J

From Philosopedia

Jabes, Jascha (20th Century) Jabes, while a student at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Jack, Homer A. (1916—1993) Jack, who founded the United Nations Non-Governmental Committee on Disarmament in the early 1970s and was its chairman until 1983, was a Unitarian minister. He founded the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), serving as executive director from 1960 to 1964. He was secretary general of the World Conference on Religion and Peace from 1970 to 1983. Further, he was a founder of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Asked once why he had a doctorate in science but was involved in so many non-scientific ventures, Jack explained, “I became more interested in men than in mice.” A dynamic organizer, he assailed McCarthyism as well as Soviet totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. Dr. Jack supported China’s entry to the United Nations. Among his books are Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi (1951), The Gandhi Reader (1955), and Religion for Peace (1973).

Jackanicz, Donald W. (20th Century) Jackanicz was the long-time secretary of the Bertrand Russell Society. An archivist with the National Archives, Great Lakes Region, he has been editor of the Russell Society News. Jackanicz in addition to being a thoroughgoing administrator was supplier at Bertrand Russell Society meetings of Red Hackles, the hard-to-obtain Scottish whiskey favored by Sir Bertrand.

Jackson, Allan Cameron (1911—1990) Jackson was an Australian atheist, rationalist, and philosopher. He studied in England at Cambridge, attending Wittgenstein’s seminars, then taught at Melbourne University, finally moving in 1966 to a chair of philosophy at Monash University. Jackson played a significant role in the Australian philosophical community and was an active member of the Rationalist Society, becoming president and then a life member. His interest was in the intellectual questions raised by rationalism, not in converting people away from religion. Jackson favored an amalgamation or alliance of the various secular and humanist groups. {SWW}

Jackson, Arthur M. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Jackson was the American Humanist Association treasurer. In San Jose, California, he currently heads “an empirical, predictive Science of Religion based on pure Humanism.” Regretting that it is “of zero interest to the gatekeepers of current Humanist organizations, he deduces that this is “because they still believe that religion is about God and it is the enemy, not something to support.” {HM2; HNS2; Humanist in Canada, Winter 1996-1997}

Jackson, Helen (Maria) Hunt (1830—1885) Jackson, a writer of travel books, children’s books, novels, and magazine articles, was a Unitarian and a transcendentalist. In her adult years, however, she had no church connection. Her A Century of Dishonor (1881) castigated the United States government for its treatment of the Indians, and her novel called Ramona (1884) merited much critical favor. Mercy Philbrick’s Choice (1876) is said to be a fictional study of her friend, Emily Dickinson. Some of Jackson’s earlier work was published under the pseudonyms of H. H. and Saxe Holm. {CE; U}

Jackson, John G. (1907— ) Jackson, an African American educator and historian, is an atheist. In his Christianity Before Christ (1938), he surveys historically the components of Christianity and shows that they existed before that religion was invented. Among the deities he cites are Adonis, Attis, Mithra, Prometheus, Krishna, and Buddha. Ages of Gold and Silver examines the origins of civilization, with his special emphasis on the long-ignored contributions of non-Caucasians. Jackson has taught at the Black Studies Department of Rutgers University, at the University of New York, and at Northeastern Illinois University.

Jackson, Linda R. (20th Century) When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Jackson was a director of the American Humanist Association. {HM2}

Jacob, Alexandre Andre (1826—1878) A French writer who used the pen name of Erdan, Jacob was the natural son of a distinguished prelate. After reading Proudhon, he refused to take holy orders. His La France Mystique (1855) was condemned for the skepticism that appears on every page. Sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of three thousand francs, he took refuge in Italy, dying at Frascati, near Rome. {BDF}

Jacob, George (19th Century) With Austin Holyoake, who also was anti-clerical, Jacob founded Holyoake & Co. in 1853.

Jacob, John (1812—1858) Jacob served during the Indian Mutiny and became an English Brigadier-General in the Crimean War (1856). He wrote Letters to a Lady on the Progress of Being in the Universe (1855), a deistic work in which he dismisses Christian doctrines as nursery-tales. {RAT; RE}

Jacob, T. Evan (19th Century) Jacob, a freethinker, is the author who wrote Saladin the Little (1887). {FUK; GS}

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743—1819) Jacobi became known in 1997 as the German philosopher who had a physical, homosexual relationship with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, or that was the revelation alleged in Karl Hugo Pruys’s The Caresses of the Tiger: An Erotic Goethe Biography. Jacobi, a critic of Kant and Spinoza, held that reason is restricted to material subjects, that the ultimate reality is to be intuitively sensed. Employing “Humean skepticism,” he defended the need for a “leap of faith,” a concept denied by Hegel and Schelling. Jacobi’s views influenced German Romanticism. {CE}

Jacobi, S. G. (20th Century) Jacobi was a scientific humanist who warned that, although something was needed to replace orthodox religion, scientific humanism must be particularly cautious not to become “scientific inhumanism.” {Literary Guide, April 1958}

Jacobs, Arthur David (1922—1996) Jacobs, a musicologist, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. He founded and edited the British Music Yearbook (1971—1979), wrote Penguin Dictionary of Musical Performers (1990), and contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992). He wrote a biography in 1994 of Henry J. Wood, the maker of the Promenade Concerts in England.

Jacobs, Steven (20th Century) A former president of the American Ethical Union, Jacobs signed Humanist Manifesto II. He is author of The Hebrew Heritage of Black Africa (1971). {HM2}

Jacobsen, Jens Peter (1847—1885) Jacobsen, a Danish novelist and botanist, was instrumental in spreading Darwinian views in Scandinavia. He translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Among his novels were Fru Marie Grubbe, scenes from the 17th century, and Niels Lyhne, which includes his philosophy of atheism. {BDF; RAT}

Jacobsen, William (20th Century) Jacobsen is executive director of the Humanist Community (AHA). (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

Jacobson, Augustus (19th Century) Jacobson was the American author of Why I Do Not Believe (1881) and The Bible Inquirer. {BDF}

Jacobson, Jens Peter (1847—1885) A Danish poet and novelist, Jacobsen was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)

Jacoby, Leopold (19th Century) Jacoby was the German author of The Idea of Development (1874—1876). {BDF}

Jacolliot, Louis (1837?—1890) Jacolliot was a French orientalist and a judge at Pondichery. He first aroused attention by his The Bible in India (1870), later writing The Religious Legislators, Moses, Manu, and Muhammad (1870) and The Natural and Social History of Humanity (1884). {BDF; RAT}

Jaffe, Eli (20th Century) Jaffe is author of Oklahoma Odyssey: A Memoir (1993), which relates his youthful adventures working in community organizing during the depths of the depression. He is a Unitarian.

Jaffree, Ishmael (20th Century) Jaffree is an African American attorney and church-state litigant before the U.S. Supreme Court. In “The Quest for Humanist Values” in Free Inquiry (Spring, 1990), he describes a 1982 complaint he filed to keep prayer and other religious activities out of the public schools of Mobile, Alabama. “As a lawyer and an agnostic who strongly believes in the separation of church and state,” he wrote, “I was seeking to maintain the integrity of the Constitution and to keep public officials from making decisions about my children’s spiritual upbringing.” But what he thought was a simple enough request resulted in a 1983 U.S. District Court ruling against him, and the case set off a national controversy about the nature of secular humanism and the separation of church and state. Fellow blacks, he found, were hostile that he was not being a “good Christian.” He was threatened, slandered, vilified by mail and phone, and his children were ostracized. But when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, the negative criticism subsided. Still, he writes, “We African Americans are among the most repressed people, and religion helps us to cope with the everyday struggles of living. . . . I wish that people would be more open to the scientific method of inquiry and not so given to mysticism.” Jaffree is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism. {AAH}

Jahagirdar, R. A. [Justice] (20th Century) Justice Jahagirdar from India addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). He is editor of The Radical Humanist, the journal formerly founded by M. N. Roy and called Independent India. The publication is devoted to scientific and rational thinking and to the promotion of a humanist view of life and social order. It is at Sassoon Building (1st Floor), Mahatma Gandhi Road near Kalaghoda, Fort, Mumbai 400 001.

JAHVE: See entry for God.

JAINISM Jainism appeared in India about the same time as Buddhism, the sixth century B.C.E., and sprang from the same root: the atheistic Sankhya philosophy. At the time, there was a revolt against the religion of Brahma, whose priests had developed their speculations into so abstract a mass of verbiage that the warriors and others broke away, and Jainism became a popular alternative. Neither Jainism nor Buddhism was meant to become religions, but both did. Their atheistic monastic communities were founded seven or eight centuries before Christianity inspired such, and, editorializes McCabe, “in their longer history they never knew anything like the corruption of the monks and nuns of Europe.” (See entry for Mahavira. For an estimate of the number of Jains worldwide, see the entry for Hell.) {RE}

James I: See entry for King James Bible.

James, Bob (20th Century) James is on the board of directors of the Bertrand Russell Society and was one of its founding members.

James, Henry: See entry for William James.

James, Leslie (20th Century) A retired barrister and former Chief Police Officer, James has written in New Humanist that “if the Church equates righteousness with uncomplaining acceptance of one’s lot in a highly competitive society, it will make scant impression on the underprivileged criminal.” Disagreeing with Harvard’s John Rawls that the good things of life should be distributed on the hypothetical social contract accepted by all humanity sitting together in embryo in ignorance of their eventual genetic and environmental fortune, James responds, “Regrettably, such a solution to our criminological problem must remain a philosophical fantasy.” In The Freethinker (June 1995), James wrote, “We are creatures of chance. Whether we were born in the First World or the Third, in England or in famine-torn Sudan, in a prosperous suburb or in a poverty-stricken inner-city, whether we were born male or female, white or black, strong or weak, clever or dull, mentally stable or unstable, and what environmental events befell us in our lives, all these circumstances are determined by chance, beyond our control.” Such an attitude must have a profound effect upon our attitude to crime and punishment, James says as a retired barrister. “Dangerous criminals must be restrained and confined; sentences must be both deterrent and reformative, and sometimes compensatory; and the deterrent element may need to be manifestly disagreeable to deter the rest of us. But punishment for punishment’s sake, for revenge or retribution, must be abandoned.”

James, Marquis (1891—1955) James wrote of Sam Houston’s freethinking tendencies in The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston (1929). {Freethought History #15, 1995}

James, Victor Montgomery Keeling (1897—1984) James, after serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, went to Melbourne, Australia, in 1947 to be co-minister with William Bottomley of the Unitarian Church. It was a time when secularism was convincing many Unitarians to move away from any theistic belief in the divinity of Jesus, leading to groups within Unitarianism who termed themselves Christian Humanists, religious rationalists, or even hymn-singing atheists. James served for twenty-two years, during which period his sermons became more rationalist and the hymns more secular. In 1961, he and W. Glanville Cook initiated a joint meeting of Unitarians and rationalists to create the Humanist Society of Victoria. James remained in the Unitarian ministry until his retirement in 1969. {SWW}

James, William (1842—1910)

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism,” James once wrote. However, at a later time he did develop a form of personal religion and was sympathetic to mysticism and spiritualism. William and Henry James were the sons of Henry James Sr., described by his biographer Alfred Habegger as a one-legged man who “reeked of turpentine, burned flesh, blood, pus, rot, agony, guilt, and endless waiting, and its fluids soaked so deeply into the folds of the boy’s [Henry Jr.’s] mind that he was permanently altered.” From time to time, a physician would cut bits of flesh away with a small, sharp knife, later finding it necessary to saw the leg off above the knee. But the stump did not heal, and yet another piece of the leg had to be sawed off, higher up. Henry Sr. had five children by three wives, and he lived a life of doom, guilt, and repentance, having been brought up in northern Ireland by his Presbyterian family. He turned to drink (then was able to stop), then turned to religion (from which he could not stop), enrolling in 1835 in the Princeton Theological Seminary. At this point he spoke out against Catholics and Spiritualists, believing that it is faith, not good works, which is the only hope of salvation. He then joined an obscure congregation inspired by the Scotsman Robert Sandeman, one that held the all clericalism and all ritual are corrupt, all doctrines superfluous, all men are depraved. In 1840, however, Henry Sr. married a woman whose small “Primitive Christian” community congregated in New York City’s Canal Street. In time, he met Emerson and became interested in Swedenborg. It was Swedenborg who told him that God is not a cruel Calvinist father who sacrificed his son, that sin is not deep inside, and that sin is the result of spirits, a fact he knew because he had “talked” to the spirits. Meanwhile, Henry Sr. was an opponent of women’s suffrage and held that woman is “inferior in passion, inferior in intellect, and inferior in physical strength.” Her very inferiority, in fact, was what made her so appealing to man. It was from such a family that William and Henry James came. William he treated as a chosen one. Henry Jr. he considered sweet, not very bright, and his mother’s favorite. The three younger children he considered as “extras.” Called an inspiration for many of the pragmatists who refined his philosophic outlooks, William James was a “radical empiricist.” He greatly influenced John Dewey’s instrumentalism, and he rejected transcendental principles, holding that the truth of a proposition is judged by its practical outcome. James joined the Harvard faculty in 1872 as a lecturer on anatomy and physiology and in 1880 he taught in the department of psychology and philosophy. His philosophy had three aspects—voluntarism, pragmatism, and radical empiricism. That which is true is “only the expedient in our way of thinking.” He believed that ideas do not reproduce objects but prepare for, or lead the way to, them. An idea’s function is to indicate “what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare.” This theory of knowledge he called pragmatism, a term already used by Charles S. Peirce. It rejects all transcendent principles and finds experience organized by means of “conjunctive relations” that are as much a matter of direct experience as things themselves. His philosophical writings include The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). One of his students at Radcliffe College who was influenced by his views on pragmatism was Gertrude Stein, who at the time was greatly interested in psychology. At Harvard, one of his students was George Santayana, who later became a colleague. When elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, James created a flurry by objecting to “the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large ‘we are in and you are out.’ . . . On the whole it seems to me that for a philosopher with my pretensions to austerity and righteousness, the only consistent course is to give up this particular vanity. . . . And I am more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy.” Leon Edel commented that the two brothers could not “live under the same roof . . . and occupy seats side by side.” At any rate, William quit the Institute, and Henry remained in the Academy. Such a statement led wags to gossip about his brother Henry’s (1843—1916) homoerotic stories and about their sister Alice’s being, according to A. L. Rowse, “a Lesbian of a pronounced type.” Henry also is alleged by Kaplan to have had homoerotic feelings toward William. Sibling rivalry was an easy case study for the eminent psychologist, whose youthful heterosexuality, according to biographer Fred Kaplan, included writing erotic poems of “phallic desires” penned to Alice. Lyndall Gordon, in A Private Life of Henry James (1999), wrote that Henry “never thought of himself as deviant, for the simple reason that the Edwardians drew a sharper line between sexual activity and tender friendship. Gordon suggests that the two women who inspired Henry the most—neither in a seriously sexual way—were Minny Temple (the prototype for Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Milly Theale) and Constance Fenimore Woolson (the prototype for Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors and for several character in his short stories). Meanwhile, in Cock and Bull (1992), Will Self fictionally, although not necessarily historically, castigates Henry, saying he had “only half a cock. Not a lot of people know that. The poor man lost it chasing after a fire engine, trying to help out as an amateur fire fighter in his native Boston. He tripped and fell beneath the horses’ hooves, only to emerge white and half unmanned. They carried him home to his exceptional family on a board. His brother William looked at poor Henry. He focused on the bloody patch that coated Henry’s breeches, and challenged God, whomsoever he might be, to make his brother whole again. He was praying for all of us you see, he knew his brother. He knew that all we could look forward to was a series of thick, turgid novels; penis substitutes. Since poor Henters couldn’t fuck anybody else, he resolved to fuck us all up with his serpentine sentences . . . uncoiling inside our minds like ever-lengthening weenies.” In short, the Jameses had and continue to have their strong critics. A postscript of The Varieties of Religious Experience and the last chapter of Pragmatism spell out James’s religious views. These include a “piecemeal supernaturalism” that could be interpreted as a vague or “enlarged and tolerant naturalism,” states William James Earle in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4. Under certain specified conditions, James wrote in his 1897 article, “The Will to Believe,” we have a right to let our passional nature decide which of two alternative hypotheses to adopt. As summarized by the University of Edinburgh’s T. L. S. Sprigge, “These are that the matter cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, and that the choice between them is living (we find each credible), forced (we must act in the light of one or the other), and momentous (really important). Examples are the choice between theism and atheism or free will and determinism.” R. W. B. Lewis, in The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991) supports other academics’ suspicions that James’s “problems” included a belief that a link occurs between introspection and masturbation and between masturbation and insanity. The possibility that James was a compulsive masturbator is discussed but is generally denied. McCabe found James’s attitude to religion “peculiar” because he did not believe in a Supreme Being but was inclined to believe in a number of super-human beings. . . and said that therefore he was rather a polytheist than a theist. He also noted that the father had been a Swedenborgian minister, that Henry remained throughout life somewhat mystic though quite outside Christianity. Henry rejected the Swedenborgian and every other creed and had no sympathy with spiritualism. . . . In A Pluralistic Universe William James speaks very disdainfully about the God of the churches. In spite of his ‘will to believe’ and against the false claim of Spiritualists he never attained a belief in personal immortality, as he admits in his Ingersoll Lecture two years before he died. His brother Henry he found “had much the same position except that he (as he said) ‘liked to think’ that there was some ground (not Spiritualism) for believing in a future life.” Science writer and skeptic Martin Gardner points out that James was a theist who believed in an afterlife, which he defended with a clever model of the brain in his little book, Human Immortality. Gardner also argues that James was “too gullible and too ignorant of methods of deception to appreciate the ease with which intelligent persons can be deceived by crafty charlatans,” and specifically he relates how James was conned by Mrs. Leonora Piper in an article, “Communicating With the Dead: William James and Mrs. Piper” (Free Inquiry, Spring 1992). (See entry for Eve Sedgwick.) {CE; CL; ER; GL; OCP; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}

Jameson, Leander Storr [Sir] (1853—1917) A physician and statesman, Jameson as a friend of Cecil Rhodes is remembered for his invasion of the Transvaal with six hundred men in 1895. But, notes McCabe, Dr. Jameson actually was a man of fine and serious character, one who was gravely deceived by South African friends. Jameson, although an agnostic, became Premier of Cape Colony. “With his natural fine character and his clear practical reasoning,” wrote his biographer G. Seymour Fort, “he early divorced himself from any theological or metaphysical leanings.” {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Jamieson, W. F. (Born 1837) The Canadian-born Jamieson moved to Michigan after having been raised a Christian. In Michigan he had a famous debate with Moses Hull, then the renowned champion of Adventism, which resulted in Hull’s conversion to Spiritualism. Jamieson held many debates with the clergy, and he wrote a pamphlet, “The Clergy, A Source of Danger to the American Republic.” With Jacob Ditzler, he wrote The Jamieson-Ditzler Debate (c. 1878). {GS; PUT}

Jamison, A(lbert) Leland (1911— ) Jamison was co-editor with James Ward Smith of Religious Perspectives in American Culture (1961). {FUS}

Jammal, George (20th Century) Jammal convinced producers of “The Amazing Discovery of Noah’s Ark” that he had discovered part of the actual Biblical ark, which Sun International Inc. then televised to a national audience in 1993. Later, he confessed that it had all been a hoax, to the embarrassment of television executives. What he had done was to “cook” some California pine, then claim he had found it on Mt. Ararat. Some supernaturalists, who are unaware of Jammal’s trickery, continue to cite the program as proof of the Ark’s existence and the Bible’s truth. Dr. Gerald Larue was in on the hoax, which illustrated how easily gullible people can be fooled. Jammal has since explained to agnostics and atheists that he believes television producers will be more wary in the future when they try to appeal to supernaturalists who want to believe such stories. Meanwhile, Skeptical Inquirer, Free Inquiry, and other journals have covered the story to the amusement of freethinkers in many countries.

JANACEK, LEOS [LEO EUGEN] 1854-1928

Janes, Lewis (1844—1901) Janes, who carried on a correspondence with Herbert Spencer, was active in the Brooklyn Ethical Association. (TRI)

Janne, Henri (20th Century) A Belgian, Janne addressed the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985). He is author of Education and Youth Employment in Belgium (1979).

Jannotta, Frank Skiff (20th Century) 

Jannotta, with M. M. Mangasarian, wrote Morality Without God (1958). {GS}

Jannotta, Stella S. (20th Century) Jannotta once was a director of the American Humanist Association.

Janowitz, Morris (20th Century) A propaganda analyst for the Department of Justice during World War II, Janowitz was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. He is author of Black Sociologists (1974) and Military Conflict (1975).

Jansen, Cornelius (Cornelius Jansenius) (1585—1638) During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Jansenius as being the opposite of an atheist. The Dutch Roman Catholic theologian believed people should return to a greater personal holiness, and Jansenism was so controversial that the Vatican listed his works on their index of prohibited readings in 1641, 1642, and 1654. This was because Pope Innocent X objected to the extreme Augustinian positions on predestination and grace which Jansen, the Bishop of Ypres (1636—1638), was preaching. Edward Roach Hardy, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, declares that “in theology Jansenism led the Roman Catholic Church to reaffirm the Tridentine position on grace and free will; but its rigorism, though rejected as such, influenced the general development of moral theology.” The Tridentine Profession of Faith, which was prescribed by Pius IV in 1564 to meet the requirements of the Council of Trent, spelled out what Catholic theology believed, particularly detailing information about points which were being assailed in the 16th century. {CE; ER; EU, Aram Vartanian}

Jantet, Charles (Born 1826) and Jantet, Henry (Born 1828) Charles and Hector Jantet were two physicians, both freethinkers, from Lyons. They published Aperçus Philosophiques on Rènan’s Life of Jesus (1864) and Doctrine Medicale Matérialiste (1866). {BDF}

Jantz, Wolfgang (20th Century) Jantz, of Germany, is a Member At Large of the Executive Committee of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists. (See entry for German Unitarians.)

JAPANESE AGNOSTICISM • Since most Japanese live as agnostics but choose to die as Buddhists, the [Japanese] funeral home will also take care of the complex religious rituals. —The Economist, 15 March 1997

JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY: See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4. (Also, see entry for Yukio Mishima, a theist.)

JAPANESE UNITARIAN-UNIVERSALISTS Shigetaro Akashi founded the Universalist Church in Nagoya in 1893. Akashi also founded the presently named Free Christian Church in 1953. One congregation meets in Tokyo. Contact: Shigeo Akashi, 5-14-10 Kitazawa, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 155, Japan.

JAR-SUB Jar-Sub, in an early Turkish religion, was God of the Universe. {LEE}

Jaroff, Leon (Morton) (1927— ) Jaroff, the founder as well as the managing editor of Discover (1980—1984), has written over twenty-nine cover stories for Time, of which he has been sciences editor. He wrote The New Genetics (1991). Jaroff is a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (PSICOP), which publishes Skeptical Inquirer, and is an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. In Who’s Who in the World, he lists himself as being Jewish.

Jarrett, Claudia Jewett (20th Century) A Unitarian, Jarrett wrote Helping Children Cope with Separation and Loss (1994), in which as a family therapist she discusses how children respond to unhappiness and what parents and others can do to help them.

Jarrett, James L(ouis) Jr. (1917— ) A member of the philosophy department at Columbia University in New York City, Jarrett was an associate editor of The Humanist in the 1950s. He is author of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1988). He also wrote The Teaching of Values (1991). {HNS}

Jarry, Alfred (1873—1907) A French playwright, founder of “pataphysics,” a French absurdist concept of philosophy that included the science of laws governing exceptions, Jarry wrote: “If souls are independent, man is God.” An illogician, he had a fictional character state, “God—or myself—created all possible worlds, they coexist, but men can hardly glimpse even one.” {PA}

Jarvis, William (20th Century) Chairman of the Department of Public Health Science at Loma Linda University in California, Jarvis is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project.

Jaspers, Karl (1883—1969) Jaspers, a German philosopher generally placed within the orbit of existentialism, wrote Man in the Modern Age (1931) and Philosophy (1932). One’s outlook, he held, should spring from the study of his individual existence, which he viewed as enclosed by an all-embracing, transcendental reality he called “the encompassing.” In Existentialism and Humanism (1952), he included his pertinent views concerning both isms. {CE}

Jastrow, Joseph (1863—1944) Jastrow and his brother, Morris, were sons of Marcus Jastrow, a Polish rabbi and editor of the Talmud material in The Jewish Encyclopedia. Joseph Jastrow became a psychologist, the President in 1900 of the American Psychological Association. For some years he was associate editor of the Psychological Review. In his Psychology of Conviction (1918), Jastrow expressed his rationalism and resented “the mist with which dogma has enveloped the atmosphere.” {RAT; RE}

Jastrow, Morris (1861—1921) Jastrow, an American Orientalist and brother of Joseph Jastrow, wrote Study of Religion (1901), a work which showed his independence of the creeds, Jewish or Christian. He scouts the idea that one religion is superior to another or that any is more than a purely natural development. {RAT}

Jastrow, Robert (1925— ) Jastrow is a physicist associated with the Mt. Wilson Observatory Hale Solar Lab in Pasadena, California. He wrote The Evolution of Stars, Planets, and Life (1967), How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete (1985), and God and the Astronomers (1992). Jastrow, in an installment of Ben Wattenberg’s “Think Tank,” said,

I’m a committed reductionist. I think that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts. But I also know that there is no way within my scientific discipline of finding out whether there is a larger purpose or design in the universe. So I remain an agnostic, and not an atheist. To profess a disbelief in the existence of design or of the deity is essentially, in itself, a theological statement which a scientist cannot make on the structure or on the strength of his own discipline. He can only make it as a personal belief.

{CA; E}

Jaucourt, Louis de (1704—1779) Jaucourt was a chevalier, French scholar, and member of the Royal Society of London and of the academies of Berlin and Stockholm. He furnished the Encyclopédie with many articles and conducted the Bibliothèque Raisonnée. {BDF}

Jaurès, Jean Leon (1859—1914) A French Socialist leader, Jaurès was a cultivated man of a middle-class family who became a professor of philosophy, then took up politics. At one time he was Vice-President of the Chamber. An agnostic, Jaurès cordially supported all the legislation against the Church. In 1914, he was murdered by a fanatical Catholic. {JM}

Javeau, Claude (20th Century) A Belgian, Javeau addressed the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985). He writes on the subject of time management surveys.

Jaxon, J. L. (20th Century) Jaxon is the publisher of Atheist Nation (PO Box 3217, Chicago, Illinois 60654).

Jayagopal (20th Century) For the Atheist Society of India, Jayagopal edited Age of Atheism (1974—1979) and in Telugu Nasthika Yugam (1972—1979).

Jayawardena, Ben (20th Century) A Sri Lankan freethinker, Jayawardena wrote Book of Gems for Truth Seekers (1953). {FUK; GS}

Jayewardene, Walter (20th Century) Jayewardene heads the Unitarian Universalist Association of Sri Lanka (61/3 Old Road, Nawala, Rajagiriya, Sri Lanka). A social activist, he is General Secretary of the Green Earth Foundation; Chairman of the Sri Lanka Gem Miners Association; Vice President of the Sri Lanka Vegetable Farmers Movement; and President of the Sri Lanka-American Solidarity Foundation. His wife, Chandranie Wijetunga, is Assistant Director of the Ministry of Finance.

JAZZ Asked by a fan to define jazz, Louis Armstrong responded, “Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.” Similarly, defining “humanism” or “democracy” or “love” is felt by many to be of limited value. (For a list of freethinking sentiments in popular music, see the entry for Andrew Charles.)

Jeans, James Hopwood [Sir] (1887—1946) An English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, Jeans in his The Stars In Their Courses (1931) wrote that there was a time when all planets of the solar system were part of the sun. This planetismal theory, taught by most astronomers of his day, held that nothing in the solar system can be called design and order. All came from unplanned catastrophes. “For the most part,” Jeans wrote, “each [planetary] voyage is in splendid isolation, like a ship on the ocean. In a scale model on which the stars are ships, the average ship will be well over a million miles from its neighbor.” A popularizer of science and the philosophy of science, Jeans was not a believer in the God of the theologians. The theologians, however, boasted how Jeans had demolished materialism. What they overlooked was that his theory equally demolished the Incarnation and most Christian doctrines. {CE; HNS2; RE}

Jefferies, Richard (1848—1887) The Story of My Heart (1883) by Jefferies, the nature-lover, told how “In the march of time there fell away from my mind, as the leaves from the trees in autumn, the last traces and relics of superstitions acquired compulsorily in childhood. Always feebly adhering, they finally disappeared.” This left him a Naturalist in every sense of the word. Dying young after several years of suffering, he was said to have had a deathbed conversion. In a eulogy, Sir Walter Besant made it appear that Jefferies, at the end, returned to the Christian faith. A few years later, however, Sir Walter wrote to Mr. H. S. Salt: “I stated in my Eulogy that he died a Christian. This was true in the sense of outward conformity. His wife read to him the Gospel of St. Luke, and he acquiesced. But, I have since been informed, he was weak, too weak not to acquiesce, and his views never changed from the time that he wrote The Story of My Heart. You are, I am convinced, quite right. When a man gets as far as Jefferies did—when he has shed and scattered to the winds all sacerdotalism and authority—he does not go back. {BDF; FO; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; (H.S. Salt, Company I Have Kept (1930); TRI}

Jeffers, Robinson (1887—1962) Jeffers, the famed poet and author of Medea (1946) wrote the present author about humanism:

The word Humanism refers primarily to the Renaissance interest in art and literature rather than in theological doctrine; and personally I am content to leave it there. “Naturalistic Humanism”—in the modern sense—is no doubt a better philosophical attitude than many others; but the emphasis seems wrong; “human naturalism” would seem to me more satisfactory, with but little accent on the ‘human.’ Man is a part of nature, but a nearly infinitesimal part; the human race will cease after a while and leave no trace, but the great splendors of nature will go on. Meanwhile, most of our time and energy are necessarily spent on human affairs; that can’t be prevented, though I think it should be minimized; but for philosophy, which is an endless research of truth, and for contemplation, which can be a sort of worship, I would suggest that the immense beauty of the earth and the outer universe, the divine “nature of things,” is a more rewarding object. Certainly it is more pleasant to think of than the hopes and horrors of humanity, and more ennobling. It is a source of strength; the other of distraction. But I have said all these things more fully in my poems, and perhaps more clearly.

Jeffers attempted to include philosophic and scientific ideas in his work, with man being of trivial importance to the universe, which would be better off if man were driven out and the grass and the cliff would “enjoy wonderful vengeance and suck / The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.” Man, “the animals Christ was rumored to have died for,” might well be cleansed through “kind” wars in order that nature can return to “the primal and the latter silences.” An individual who found nature’s stern beauty consoling, Jeffers considered nature of prime importance and man more a doomed and inverted animal within that pantheistic ideal. His adaptations of Greek tragedy brought him wide recognition, as did such works as The Woman At Point Sur (1927) and Dear Judas (1929). {CE; EU, William F. Ryan; WAS, 25 March 1951}

JEFFERSON BIBLE The Jefferson Bible is on the Web: <angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/>. It is of particular interest inasmuch as Thomas Jefferson omits the tale about the supernatural birth of Jesus.

Jefferson, Thomas [President] (1743—1826) The third U.S. President was the nation’s most intellectual and philosophic chief of state. Jefferson established as well as designed the buildings of the University of Virginia. He believed in the trinity . . . but his was Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. Jefferson’s was the god of nature, not that of revelation or theology. The Declaration of Independence, except for minor alterations by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and others made on the floor of Congress, was his work. It took until 1786 for his bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia to pass, and it was grounded in the belief that man’s opinions cannot be coerced—had it not been for his efforts, others might have established a United Protestant Church of America with who-knows-who as its “pope.” Of particular interest to humanists is The Jefferson Bible, in which Jefferson textually extracted the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, and French. Some religionists were alarmed that Jefferson had excised references to the supernatural. As a result and for protection, many buried their Holy Bibles in the ground, fearing the Jefferson text would be designated the only one allowed. In 1800, the New England Palladium wrote, “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some devoted to the worship of the most High.” Such a viewpoint was known to Jefferson, who expressed in allusions to Connecticut, for example, that the New England clergy represented

. . . the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those advances of the mind which had carried the other States a century ahead of them.

To John Adams, Jefferson wrote that he longed for the time when “this den of the priesthood is at last broken up.” To the Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802, Jefferson wrote,

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American People which declared that their legislators should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

In 1998 James H. Hutson, chief of the Library of Congress’s manuscript division and a Presbyterian, questioned Jefferson’s meaning, saying it “was never conceived by Jefferson to be a statement of fundamental principles; it was meant to be a political manifesto, nothing more.” Conservative religionists claimed this was proof that Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State” metaphor should never have been interpreted as an overarching principle. Disagreeing, Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, countered that Hutson’s view was “merely one opinion” that most scholars do not hold. The 6’ 2 1/2” tall statesman, whose pet mockingbird pecked its food from its master’s own lips, invented a revolving chair, a pedometer, a revolving music stand, a letter-copying press, and a hemp machine. Unlike Franklin, who wore plain clothes, Jefferson dressed like a dandy and was often seen wearing striped linen, a powdered wig, and a large topaz ring. Visitors to his home at Monticello see his skill as an architect. The “dumb waiters,” according to Susan R. Stein’s The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (1993), were private service trays that also were a fad in Paris, built to insure that servants could not overhear conversations. At a time when Paris was experiencing a revolution, Jefferson went on a buying spree, sending eighty-six large crates of goods back for his public and private use—these included seven busts by Houdon, forty-eight formal chairs, damask hangings, four full-length mirrors in gilt frames, and 120 porcelain plates. The Sèvres table sculptures had been made for Louis XVI (and it is not clear how Jefferson managed to obtain them). The Monticello home’s entrance featured what he called “my Indian hall” and contained painted buffalo robes, moccasins, a head dress, and specimens such as mastodon bones, mounted moose, and elk antlers from the Lewis and Clark and other expeditions. One of the few items left, after his death and when his daughter had to sell everything in order to pay off his huge debts, was the famous clock in the entrance hall— it was not removable. The best way to categorize such a complex thinker, remarked Eugene R. Sheridan, is to quote his letter to the Rev. Ezra Styles Ely (25 June 1819): “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Jefferson also wrote to Benjamin Rush, “I am a Christian, in the only sense he [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.” To Benjamin Waterhouse in 1811 he referred to the Revelation of St. John as “the ravings of a maniac,” adding,

The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, Materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.

In 1822, in another letter to Waterhouse, Jefferson wrote, “. . . that there is one only God, and he all perfect” (26 June 1822). To John Adams, he wrote, “I have read his [Priestley’s] Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them . . . as the basis of my own faith” (22 August 1813). In another letter to Adams (11 April 1823), Jefferson wrote, “And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.” Dr. J. Thomas in his Dictionary of Biography says that Jefferson “in religion is denominated a freethinker.” He spoke in old age of “the hocus-pocus phantom of God, which like another Cerberus had one body and three heads.” Religious liberals often quote his sentence, “The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. No man has the power to let another prescribe his faith.” As a summary, and sounding like the deist of his time, he wrote of his hope that “. . . there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die a Unitarian.” Publicly, however, he remained a member of the Church of England, was a friend of the local priest, supported the priest’s church, but made himself unavailable to become a godparent because of his not being a trinitarian. Jaroslav Pelikan, President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has termed Jefferson a “rationalist Anglican.” Robert S. Alley, professor of humanities emeritus at the University of Richmond, however, holds (Free Inquiry, Fall 1998) that “Any perusal of the Jefferson writings will establish that the Sage of Monticello was a Deist.” To the minister of the First Parish Church (Unitarian) in Portland, Maine, Jefferson once requested the services of a Unitarian minister for himself and for a small group of friends. The reply was that there was no one available to be sent so far away, to which a disappointed Jefferson is said to have remarked that he would have “to be a Unitarian by myself.” Meanwhile, Jefferson also wrote

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.

In 1815 when he listed his Albemarle County property for tax purposes, he included all the pictures, mirrors, chairs, and small items, but the list began with the big items:

5640. acres of land . . . 90. slaves of or about the age of 12 years 12. do. [ditto] of 9. and under 12 years 73. heads of cattle 27. horses, mares, mules and colts.

On the Fourth of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was deathly ill. The day before, his pulse was barely perceptible but he had said he wanted so badly to live until the 4th as well as to outlive John Adams, who also was ill. “This is the Fourth?” he asked N. P. Trist, husband to one of Jefferson’s granddaughters. It was only 11 PM, and Trist did not answer. Jefferson repeated the question, and Trist nodded yes, a forgivable white lie. Jefferson lived until the afternoon of the 4th, dying almost precisely at the time that John Adams did. The coincidence led a New York newspaper to report that the “like had never happened in the world, nor can it ever happen again, we may almost say with certainty.” In Washington, D.C., the National Intelligencer agreed: “No language can exaggerate it—no reason account for it. It is one of those events which have no example on record, and as a beauteous moral must forever stand alone on the page of history.” Much of Virginia’s Declaration of Human Rights, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Pauline Maier, was copied from George Mason’s preliminary draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Human Rights, including the words that “all men are created equal.” In her American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, Maier wrote that Jefferson’s draft was wordy, that one-fourth was cut by Congress. Jefferson’s extravagant lifestyle and generosity to friends left him debt-ridden. In a will signed only a few months before his death at the age of eighty-three, he took notice that he was survived by only one of his six children, Martha, and her bankrupt husband, Thomas Mann Randolph. Jefferson at one point was forced to sell part of his incomparable library to Congress for $23,950 in order to pay off some of his debts, and his bequest of the remaining collection of books to the University of Virginia greatly helped that school. To his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson gave “my silver watch in preference to the golden one, because of its superior excellence, my papers of business going of course to him, as my executor, all others of a literary or other character I give to him as of his own property.” And to James Madison he gave a gold-mounted walking staff of animal horn as “a token of the cordial and affectionate friendship which for nearly now an half century has united us in the same principles and pursuits of what we have deemed for the greatest good of our country.” A great debate has ensued concerning Jefferson’s views about the Negroes of his time. Pulitzer-Prize-winning author David K. Shipler has noted the powerful contradiction of the Jefferson legacy. On the one hand, Jefferson was for individual liberty for everyone of every race. On the other, notes Shipler,

He believed in the inferiority of black people, demonstrating how even a great thinker can remain captive of the racist stereotypes of his time. . . . In his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1785, Jefferson observes his slaves and endorses virtually every stereotype—positive and negative—that today characterizes the system of prejudices about black people physically, mentally, sexually, emotional. . . . “They secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor,” he argues, adding that this “renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold than the whites. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. . . . They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. . . . In memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.”

	Jefferson, Shipler notes, “opposed racial mixing and intermarriage. His idea was to free the slaves, train them for self-sufficiency, and then deport them, for he saw no possibility that blacks and whites could live together. . . . There are two histories of Jefferson, the two histories of America. If we face Jefferson,” Shipler declares, “we face ourselves.” 

Indicative of a possible new attitude toward Jefferson is that of Conor Cruise O’Brien, who, in The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785—1800 (1996), has termed him a radical and a racist, one whose flaws are beyond redemption and whose reputation is undeserved. For O’Brien, Jefferson represents a liberal tradition which is intellectually, socially, and politically untenable. O’Brien is ferocious in his attack on the long affair with French revolutionaries and with Jefferson’s handling of slaves, particularly one Jame Hubbard. Also, he predicted that

. . . the American civil religion, official version—let me call it ACROV—will have to be reformed in a manner that will downgrade and eventually exclude Thomas Jefferson. Finally, I believe that Jefferson will nonetheless continue to be a power in America in the area where the mystical side of Jefferson really belongs: among the radical, violent, anti-federal libertarian fanatics.” He adds, “I believe that the orthodox multiracial version of the American civil religion must eventually prevail—at whatever cost—against the neo-Jeffersonian racist schism. That the orthodox version should prevail is vital not only for America but also for the future of nonracial democracy, and of Enlightenment values generally, in those parts of the world where these are now dominant or where people are struggling to bring them into effective being.

O’Brien called attention to Jefferson’s unethical link with The National Gazette, a newspaper he covertly supplied with pro-French-revolutionary editorial guidance while he was Secretary of State. And he cited Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” words used to excuse much bloodshed. Similarly, Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation (1995) attacked Jefferson as “the greatest southern reactionary” in American history, adding, “Jefferson was obsessed, in particular, by the fear that his precious Anglo-Saxon nation would be corrupted by inter-marriage with nonwhites. . . . Every major feature of the modern United States—from racial equality to Social Security, from Pentagon to the suburb—represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism.” Further evidence of changing attitudes about Jefferson is found in Joseph J. Ellis’s American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997). Ellis describes the person who drafted the Declaration of Independence as a foppish young man with limited political skill, a shy man of whom John Adams said, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” As for Jefferson’s character, Ellis wrote, “He was never a legend in his own time, always a controversial figure who combined great depth with great shallowness, massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception.” Ellis, who read all 60,000 of Jefferson’s letters, plus the letters of his friends and enemies, thinks that “the more you immerse yourself in the Jefferson papers, the more difficult it becomes to imagine a liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It’s ironic, the more grounded you are, the more likely you are to get this wrong.” However, Jefferson’s 1785 and 1787 negative views on blacks were set down when he was in his 30s. In 1809, he wrote a letter to Henri Grégroire that contained the following, which Shipler does not cite:

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them [blacks] by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation. . . . On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. I pray you therefore to accept my thanks for the many instances you have enabled me to observe of respectable intelligence in that race of men, which cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief.

(He never reversed his statement that sodomy should be punished by castration. See entry for homosexuality.) Monroe Trotter, a leading black editor in the early 20th century, claimed that he was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Hemimgs was half-sister to Jefferson’s wife, Martha, both having been fathered by the same owner of a plantation. By the age of fifteen, Sally had accompanied Jefferson’s daughter on a voyage to join Jefferson in Paris, and many believe she became his concubine. Before returning to the United States, Hemings allegedly extracted the promise that he would free any children that she might bear him before they reached the age of twenty-one. Over the years, she gave birth to six children, some if not all of whom were thought by some to have been Jefferson’s. Willard Sterne Randall, however, called the Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship fanciful: “She was only eight when Jefferson last resided at Monticello and was mourning his wife’s death.” The alleged “Congo Harem” which Jefferson was supposed to have had, Randall believes, was a politically motivated and preposterous rumor. DNA tests in 1998, however, proved Randall and others wrong. Blood samples collected by Tufts University Professor Eugene A. Foster confirmed the oral tradition that, indeed, the nation’s third President fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children. Fifty-two-year-old John Jefferson of Norrisville, Pennsylvania, has been shown to be a direct descendant of Hemings through Eston Hemings Jefferson. His Y chromosome matched blood samples taken from the descendants of Jefferson’s uncle, Field Jefferson. “I’ve known it practically all my life,” Jefferson said in a public statement. Commenting on the 1998 DNA evidence of miscegenation, Prof. Annette Gordon-Reed of New York Law School and author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy said, “If people had accepted this story, he would never have become an icon. All these historians did him a favor until we could get past our primitive racism. I don’t think he would have been on Mount Rushmore or on the nickel. The personification of America can’t live thirty-eight years with a black woman.” Prof. Gordon-Reed, however, may have revealed her own prejudgments, critics were quick to note. Dr. Eugene A. Foster, the author of the original DNA analysisand a co-author of the Nature article that contained the test results, has complained that individuals have misunderstood his work. The retired pathologist, writing in Nature (January 1999), supported the view that any of several males in the Jefferson family could have fathered Eston Hemings, the child whose descendants bear the Jefferson Y chromosome. Foster believes it is more probable that Jefferson was Eston’s father, rather than other individuals suspected at the time, two of Jefferson’s nephews on his sister’s side. At a 1999 family reunion in Monticello, the eighty-sixth such, both the Jefferson and Hemings families met. Many of the two hundred Jefferson descendants were unwilling not only to open their arms to descendants of Jefferson’s slave but also were unwilling to open the family cemetery. The six-member executive committee of the Monticello Association declared, according to their president, Robert M. Gillespie, “More evidence is coming forward, and we invited it. But let’s make sure we make the correct decision, not a quick decision.” As a result, the official organization of Jefferson’s family went on record as not being prepared to accept the Hemings line as Jefferson descendants. As the century ended, Daniel P. Jordan, now the Jefferson Memorial Foundation president, announced that “although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainy, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” James Truscott, president of the Monticello Association that previously had resisted the notion, declared his group would issue a report some time in 2000. For freethinkers, the DNA test results were easily accepted as fact. Individuals and events need to be seen in the context of their times. If Jefferson had sexual relations with a person considered little more than property by others, and if their relationship continued for a long time, this is not necessarily bad news. The findings are replete with humanistic overtones. Jefferson’s tombstone at Monticello, Virginia, is inscribed with “O.S.” (old style calendar; the year began in March rather than January), not “A.D.” (year of Our Lord):

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia Born April 2, 1743 O.S. Died July 4, 1826

(See entries for Church and State and Native Americans—Ethnic Cleansing. The entry for E. C. Vanderlaan contains Benjamin Rush’s telling Jefferson that George Washington did not like to discuss his religious outlook. Roger E. Greeley offers a collection of the intellectual Jefferson’s quotes in Thomas Jefferson’s Freethought Legacy [1995].) {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Eugene Sheridan; FUS; HNS2; JM; Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1996; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; U; UU; Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, 7 January 1999; Washline, September 1997}

JEFFERSON, TERRITORY OF From 1859 to 1861, residents of a region in what today is Colorado voted to establish the Territory of Jefferson and elected Robert W. Steele as provisional governor. Although never recognized by Congress, the territory passed laws and the franchise was denied to Native and African Americans. In 1861, Congress passed the Organic Act which created the Territory of Colorado. The provisional government soon dismantled, and William Gilpin replaced Steele as governor. {E)

Jeffrey, Francis [Lord] (1773—1850) A Scottish judge, Jeffrey became Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1829, Lord Advocate in 1830, and Judge of the Court of Session in 1834. He helped to found, and for years edited, The Edinburgh Review. Although Hugh Miller in The Treasury of Modern Biography stated that although Jeffrey was “infected in youth and middle age by the widespread infidelity of the French Revolution,” he later abandoned it. In Lord Cockburn’s Life and Letters of Lord Jeffrey (1852), however, there was no such change. {RAT; RE}

JEHOVAH: See entry for God. JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a religious denomination that expects the Millennium to begin within a very few years. They call God by the name Jehovah and deny the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus, however, they consider to be the greatest of the witnesses of Jehovah. The Bible, they believe, says that they are forbidden to accept blood transfusion, even to save their lives. A number of them, have, according to David A. Reed’s Blood on the Altar: Confessions of a Jehovah’s Witness Minister (1996), died, some at a young age, because of this belief. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are at 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Rikki Beadle-Blair, in the video entitled “Captivated,” writes of the black Englishman who while in prison drools over the two “fuckable” Witnesses who visit his cell. But if they want to convert him, he explains, they are going to have to speak to him in his own street-trash lingo: “Don’t say ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,’ say ‘If your shit don’t stink, let me see you wear a turd as a moustache!’ — you know, plain English, like.” {DCL}

Jekyll, Walter (20th Century) Jekyll, a freethinker, wrote The Bible Untrustworthy (1904). {GS}

Jellie, William (20th Century) A Unitarian minister who moved from Auckland to England, Jellie in a 1910 sermon on Genesis said, according to John Maindonald,

For what is Nature? Nature is only a comprehensive name, like God, meaning all things that are, and ever have been, and ever will be.

Jenkins, Clare (20th Century) A Passion for Priests: Women Talk of Their Love for Roman Catholic Priests (1995), by Jenkins, includes interviews with individuals willing to reveal the greatest secret of their lives: having been emotionally involved with a priest. “Some had known their priests for twenty or more years,” Jenkins reports, “longer than many marriages last. Others had had briefer affairs. One had married the man concerned. By no means all the relationships were sexual.” Those most seriously affected were women with children fathered by their priests. The crux of the problem, Jenkins stated, is the 800-year-old rule of clerical celibacy and the unwillingness to permit the ordination of women. A possible sequel, notes a Manhattan wag, could be A Passion for Parishioners: Priests Talk of Their Love for Roman Catholic Parishioners.

Jenkins, Hugh (Gater) (1908— ) Lord Jenkins of Putney is a Labour politician and campaigner for freedom of expression and the arts. A member of the House of Commons for Stoke Newington and Hackney North, Jenkins has been chairman of Victory for Socialism (1956—1960) and a member of the Arts Council (1968—1971). With others, he wrote Essays in Local Government Enterprise (1964). In 1995, he was named an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association.

Jenkins, Lydia Ann Moulton (1824?—1874) One of the first women to preach as a Universalist, Jenkins was ordained by the Ontario Association of Universalists in Geneva, New York, in 1860, the first ordination of a woman by a denominational body in the nation. In the 1850s she spoke and wrote on women’s rights issues and against what she had been taught in her Calvinist upbringing. In 1858 the Ontario Association of Universalists granted her a letter of Fellowship (Fairport, New York). She and her husband became ministers of the Universalist Church in Clinton, NY, in 1860. The Unitarian Universalist Women’s Heritage Society has stated that “although Olympia Brown is generally recognized as the first woman minister (1863), Lydia’s ordination may have been overlooked because of fear of potential controversy.” By giving the commencement address in 1859 at Lombard College, she was one of the first women, if not the first woman, to have given such a speech at any United States college. {U&U}

Jenkins, Norm (20th Century) Jenkins is an Arizona humanist who thinks non-supernaturalists should advertise more. He recommends automobile bumper stickers with signs such as Scientific Inquiry, The Only Path To Reality Arizona Secular Humanists. Call (602) 203-5328

Jenkins’s E-mails: <eupraxopher@collegeclub.com> or <njenkins@genuity.com>. {Secular Nation, July-September 1998}

Stephan Jenkins, Recording Artist music

Jenkins is the frontman for Third Eye Blind. From a 16-Dec-00 AP report on the 'Jingle Ball' at New York City's Madison Square Garden by Jennifer Vineyard: Though not much was said about the holiday festivities onstage, Jenkins was more than happy to elaborate backstage about his feelings on the season. For Christmas, he said, he plans to go to midnight mass with his mother in Portland, though neither is a believer in God. "But I'm a big believer in praying," he explained, "and I'm a believer in singing. So it's an opportunity to sing and pray, and I like that a lot. I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist."

Jenkins, Stephan (27 Sep 1964 - ) Jenkins is an alternative rock performer, singer, and recording artist, the frontman for a group called Third Eye Blind. Jennifer Vineyard, in a report (16 Dec 2000) on the “Jingle Ball” at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, wrote that although onstage little was said about the holiday festivities, backstage Jenkins “was more than happy to elaborate.” For Christmas, he said, he will accompany his mother to midnight mass, although neither believes in God. “But I’m a big believer in praying,” he explained, “and I’m a believer in singing. So it’s an opportunity to sing and pray, and I like that a lot. I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It’s so conformist.” {CA}

Jenkins, William P. (20th Century) Jenkins has been an activist member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

Jenner, Edward (1749-1823) • A British physician and God’s nemesis. His discovery of vaccination led to the eventual eradication of smallpox which, for countless centuries, had been God’s favorite scourge for sinners. —Carol C. Faulkenberry, Atlanta Freethought Society

Jenney, Marie Hoffendahl (19th Century) Jenney, who was graduated in 1897 by the Meadville Theological School, was a writer who was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1898. {World, May-June 1995}

Jennings, Herbert Spencer (1868—1947) A zoologist and one of the highest authorities on the science in the United States, Jennings in his 1933 Terry Lectures at Yale University (The Universe and Life) referred to a cheap symposium that had recently been published. It had had a catchy title, “Has Science Discovered God?” to which Jennings answered that in his own science the answer had to be No. “The progress of life,” he insisted, “is not of the kind that would be anticipated if life were following a certain existing pattern, seeking a goal already set, or being guided by an all-knowing and all-powerful being.” {JM; RE}

Jennings, Ivor (1903—1965) Jennings, a freethinker, was a vice president of the National Council for Civil Liberties. {TRI}

Jennings, Robert L. (19th Century) Jennings was an editor of The Free Enquirer, a New Harmony, Indiana, freethought paper in the 1820s and 1830s. {FUS}

Jensen, Johannes V. (1873—1950) Jensen’s Danish novel The Fall of the King (1900—1901) has been termed by Ingwersen a chilling masterpiece “in which all human aspirations seem ridiculous in view of the very brevity of human life. A human being’s fate, as shown through the symbol of grinding millstones, is simply to be smashed to bits—into nothingness.” Life, the author warns his readers, is to be accepted in all its beautiful banality, for that is all there is. Not only did Jensen reject Christianity but also he rejected the melancholy atheism that turns some people into fatalist or nihilists. Adds Ingwersen, Jensen “denounced Friedrich Nietzsche, as well, for being a grand and dangerous seducer who distracts the human mind from this very real world of facts.” {CE; EU, Faith Ingwersen}

Jensen, J(ohn) Vernon (1922— ) Jensen, for his 1959 Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Minnesota, wrote on the rhetoric of Thomas H. Huxley and Robert G. Ingersoll in relation to the conflict between science and religion. {FUS}

Jensen, Peter Christian Albrecht (1861—1936) Jensen, a leading German Orientalist, taught Semitic languages at Marburg University. He was an authority in Germany on Babylonia and Assyria. His rationalism is found in his Moses, Jesus, Paulus (1909—1910, 2 volumes) and Hat der Jesus der Evangelien wirklich gelebt? (1910). In the latter book, Jensen contents that the story of Jesus is a myth based upon the Epic of Gilgamesch. {RAT; RE} Jensen, William (20th Century) Jensen, a professor of the history of chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, told the Cincinatti Free Inquiry Group in 1999 about Baron Karl von Reichenbach, who around 1845 claimed to have discovered a new force which he named Od, a reference to Odin. Od, claimed the Baron, could only be seen by especially sensitive humans, whom he dubbed sensitives. William James, Jensen told the Cincinatti group, once divided the human race into two groups—the tough-minded and the soft-headed. Jensen suggested, in light of such charlatans, a third group—the soft-minded. (See entry for Zyp.) {FIG Leaves, March 1999}

Jersild, Per Christian (1935— ) Jersild is a Swedish physician, author, journalist, and debater. In Darwin’s Ofullbordade (Darwin’s Unfinished, 1997), he wrote

The concept life stance has wider frames than the concept view of man—but since man puts himself in focus a life stance which does not embrace man as well is hardly possible. A religious person might claim that the conception of god is the essence of a life stance, but for myself as non-religious, as agnostic, as one who does not claim to have definite answers to the great questions, it is naturally to put the view of man in focus of my life stance. What is it that creates a decent order in the living room in my house of thoughts? For my part it is The Modern Project. The concept “modern” has many meanings, not the least in the arts, but The Modern Project is here another word for The Age of Enlightenment. . . . The complication with Christianity is that it to a high extent has been interested in life hereafter and left life on earth and politics at that. Thus, one can see . . . The Enlightenment as an attempt to practically and political implicate original Christian values of human dignity. But because the Enlightenment is anti-authoritative, tolerant, and run by reason, it tries to perform its project without the Bible’s dictatorial image of God. One cuts the Ten Commandments from the first and the second dictates and keeps the rest. Christianity has become humanism.

Jersild, although not a member of the Swedish Humanist Association, is clearly a secular humanist, according to Fredrik Bendz.

JERUSALEM SYNDROME The British Medical Journal, in an article about Jerusalem Syndrome, detailed Ms. Siegel-Itzkovich’s statement that it has been known about by Israeli psychiatrists for decades and is “a temporary psychiatric condition characterised by patients believing they have become biblical figures such as Jesus, John the Baptist, or Moses. . . . It affects mainly Christian pilgrims, but is occasionally diagnosed in Jews who tour holy sites. Those affected begin to act strangely, sometimes proclaiming that they are ancient religious figures sent on a holy mission.” (The Freethinker, April 1999)

Jervas, Charles (1675—1739) Jervas was so distinguished an artist that he was appointed principal painter to George I and George II, yet his opulent house in London was one of the chief deistic centres. Walpole said that Jervas “piqued himself on total infidelity,” an indication that Jervas was an avowed atheist. {RAT; RE}

Jesse, W. W. (19th Century) Jesse, who was president of the Oregon State Secular Union, led his group, which included the following in the 1890s: J. Henry Schroeder, B. F. Hyland, D. W. Smith, vice-presidents; Katie Kehm Smith, secretary; and D. C. Stewart, treasurer. {RE}

Jesseph, Doug (20th Century) Jesseph, of North Carolina State University, is a supporter of Internet Infidels.

JESUITS If freethinkers or humanists were “forced” to join a church, the ideal order for them would likely be that of the Jesuits. The Jesuit order, the largest in the Roman Catholic Church, was founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, its official name being the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits have a long tradition of vigorous missionary work and of intellectual and scholarly achievement. Some spend up to fifteen years in training. Behind the scenes, they are known for their influence in European politics and for their skill and resourcefulness in debate, characteristics that have led some—even several of the Popes—to mistrust them. Before the middle of the 18th century, a combination of publicists (including Voltaire) and the absolute monarchs of Catholic Europe undertook to destroy them. Portugal expelled the Jesuits in 1759. France suppressed them in 1764. The Spanish dominions were closed to them in 1767. In 1773, Clement XIV dissolved the order, but Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great refused to publish the brief suppressing them, so they continued to exist, mainly as educators, in Prussia and Russia. In 1814 Pius VII re-established them as a world order. Jesuitical as an adjective is used to describe devious argumentation. In the United States, the Jesuit schools include Fordham, Georgetown, and St. Louis University. The period of 1965 to 1981, during which the Reverend Pedro Arrupe led the Jesuits, was known as the era of social activism. When he suffered a brain hemorrhage, the order’s Superior General became the Very Reverend Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, a sixty-five-year-old Dutch Jesuit. The ranks of Jesuits have thinned since the mid-1960s when there were 36,000. It is estimated that there were 23,000 Jesuits in 1994. In 1995 at a 34th General Congregation in Rome, the Jesuits although they “did not pretend or claim to speak for women” did declare their “personal concern” for the “unjust treatment and exploitation of women.” They lamented that women have limited access to positions of influence, undergo female circumcision, have wage differences, are discriminated against in education, and as young girls are sometimes killed. The Jesuits stopped just short of recommending that women be ordained as priests. (See the section on Jesuits in McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia.) {DCL}

JESUS G. A. Wells, professor of German at the University of London, is one of many who contend that Jesus was probably not a historical person. Rather, he holds, Jesus, William Tell, and King Arthur are legendary figures. The dramatist Terrence McNally, in Corpus Christi, not only describes Jesus as a human but also refers to homosexuality among Jesus and his Apostles.

Jesus (4 B.C.E.?—29 C.E.?) Approximately thirty centuries ago, the Chinese invented kites made of bamboo, silk, and paper. The individuals responsible may have been forgotten, but their positive contributions are still appreciated. Long after that, a thousand or so years, a human being by the name of Jesus allegedly was born. Few agree as to when he, or He (for some claim he was God in disguise), was born. Many doubt that he even existed. Charles Francis Potter in the 1920s and 1930s suggested that because of changes in our present calendar, Jesus was born four years before B.C. (the Birth of Christ), that he died in 27 A.D. (anno Domini, in the year of the Lord). The Cambridge Factfinder lists Jesus as having been born “c. 5 BC” and being crucified in Jerusalem “c. 30 A.D.” Other sources mention from 6 B.C.E. to 4 A.D., suggesting that he lived about thirty-three years. If He was the Christ, He was born B.C. (before Christ)! (See entry for Christmas, in which Wick Allison figures the date at 6 B.C.E.) Tacitus in the 2nd century stated only what Christians believed about Jesus. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote about Jesus, but Wells and others declare that “no one can accept the glowing paragraph in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (C. E. 93) as coming from the hand of this orthodox Jew; it has to be regarded as at best a Christian reworking of a passage originally hostile to Jesus. That the non-Christian evidence is unhelpful has been conceded by many Christian scholars (e.g., Albert Schweitzer and D. P. Davies).” Meanwhile, Christians make the leap of faith and believe not only that Jesus the God existed but also that He, the Son, is the Second Person of the Trinity. The third is the Holy Ghost (or “Holy Spirit,” for those who do not believe in any species of ghost). Maréchal during the French Revolution cited Jesus as being the opposite of an atheist. Jesus was written about by biblical authors who did not know him during his lifetime. G. A. Wells, in Encyclopedia of Unbelief, lists various scholars who have written about and denied the historicity of Jesus: Guy Fau, Prosper Alfaric, W. B. Smith, and J. M. Allegro. Whether or not he lived, and who inseminated his mother, Mary, has been debated for centuries. Roman Catholic priest Father Raymond E. Brown, emeritus professor of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, has made new and often provocative interpretations of the New Testament. In The Death of the Messiah (1994), his 1,608-page commentary on the last days of Jesus, he favors John’s opinion that some Jewish authorities wanted Jesus executed but merely questioned him after Jesus was arrested, this because he represented a blasphemer’s threat to the temple. Such a view, that there was some Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus, helps fan controversies with Jews, who generally deny that Jesus was considered a blasphemer. Brown, however, points up the anti-Jewish sentiment easily found in the Gospels of Matthew and John. When John describes water and blood coming from the dying Jesus’s body, Brown interprets this as symbolic of Jesus’s pouring out the Holy Spirit on the early church. Orthodox Christians remain wary whenever any scholar such as Brown claims that their “divinely inspired Bible” is not literal history. Jesus appears not to have been an “orthodox Jew,” according to Gerald Larue (in Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 3). The Gospels portray him as anything but that, for he associated with the wrong people—sinners and the hated tax collectors. According to Luke 8:1-3, Jesus and his disciples traveled with women who “provided for them out of their means” (and some manuscripts read “provided for him”). Further, no Jew living during the first thirty years of the first century of the Common Era could have lived according to the codified Mishnah. The codification of the Mishnah began following the destruction of the Temple in 70 and was completed during the early third century. Thus, first-century Jewish “orthodoxy” cannot be properly defined by reference to codes formulated in later eras. Thousands were crucified around Jerusalem in the first century, according to John Dominic Crossan, a professor of biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Unlike other scholars, Crossan holds that no one, including Joseph of Arimathea, buried Jesus. He thinks it likely that some Roman soldiers in deference to Jewish piety might have thrown the body into a shallow grave. In such a case, dogs would likely have eaten the body of Jesus. On Easter, then, there was no empty tomb. According to Crossan, there was not even a tomb. Meanwhile on the subject of the Jews having crucified Jesus, Sura 4 of the Qur’an states, “Killed him not, they did not crucify him, but it was made to appear that way to them.” A pundit has said that Jesus was both original and inspiring: unfortunately, what was inspiring was not original, and what was original with Jesus was not inspiring. What caught the imagination of the masses, the pundit continued, was the spin added by the greatest public relations person of all time, Saul of Tarsis: “I am the way, the truth and the light. No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” Proof of Jesus’s existence? His Omnipresence is on the Web: <http://members.aol.jesus316/index.htm>. (See entries for Christmas; Ganymede; Homosexuality; Immaculate Conception; Qualifications for a Leader; and Resurrection. Also, see the entry for Jesus in McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia. For details of his foreskin, see entry for Circumcision.) {CE; ER; EU, G. A. Wells; FUK}

JESUS, MARRIAGE OF In his Da Vinci Code, novelist Dan Brown plots Leonardo da Vinci’s role in keeping secret that Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute, was the wife of Jesus and the mother of their child. Their heirs, Brown postulates, threatened the early church, causing power struggles. As a result, a clandestine priory, of which Leonardo was a member, formed to keep the secret. The novel starts by telling the story of a renowned Harvard symbologist who is summoned to the Louvre Museum to examine a series of cryptic symbols relating to Da Vinci's artwork. In decrypting the code, he uncovers the secret of Jesus’s marriage and child, but then becomes a hunted man because such information threatened the church’s very existence.

JESUS, RESIGNATION OF (Las Vegas) After a fortnight of vacation to “evaluate his life” and “reassess his goals” and career, Jesus Christ today announced his resignation. Sources say that he was probably under pressure to resign after failing to capitalize fully on his success. While the religion he founded raked in billions each year, a significant number of people refused to buy into it, and earnings had been falling in recent years. “I mean, my life just wasn’t going anywhere,” the 2,000-year-old Jerusalem-born saviour said in an interview. “I had a productive period a while back. “You know, walking around on water and shit. But to be honest since then I haven’t gotten out much and haven’t really gotten anything done.” Jesus, who answers prayer requests, admitted that he had been somewhat leisurely about his work in recent years. “I sometimes just drift off and can’t seem to concentrate. I plain slept through the entire 1940s,” mankind’s Saviour told reporters, explaining how the Second World War was allowed to happen. . . . Jesus said that his resignation was not due in any way to his arrest this February for stalking. Charges are still pending on that matter, after police realized that Jesus’s omnipresence left him open to an estimated 50,000 counts of stalking. A police source, who wished to remain anonymous, stated that they were “still sorting out the paperwork” and estimated it would be at least another two centuries before all the charges were calculated, researched, and filed. . . . The retirement, effective immediately, means that Christians who are seeking spiritual aid or guidance will no longer receive an answer to their prayers. . . . Jesus explained that, in order to minimize confusion in coming weeks and also to update prayer-answering to match today’s technology he will be installing a voicemail system. . . . I don’t want to bother with any of that shit while I’m on vacation.” . . . Archbishop Jim Carrey of Westminster Cathedral told reporters that “You can expect the same great service from our voicemail system that you’ve always gotten from Jesus.” The response from Christians were varied although the changes were taken extremely well by the majority. “I just thank God for this,” said Southern Baptist Chuck Whitman. “Getting up early on Sunday was just killing me, so I’m pretty glad actually.” The Fearsome Atheist Webzine <http://fearsome.net/rants.htm>.

Jesus [Lee Jae-rok] (20th Century) Jesus is alive and well in Seoul, South Korea. He is pastor of All Holiness Church. When a television station attempted to air a program exploring Jesus’s “heretical” statements and his gambling habits, six church leaders stormed the network and interrupted the broadcast. Several hundred members of the church overpowered fifty guards, successfully cutting the program off the air, and 1,500 of its members protested in front of the television station, demanding that the network cancel any future programs. The police sought arrest warrants for the six leaders. Meanwhile, the church was expelled from the Korean National Council of Churches, averring that its Jesus is not the Jesus who claims he is Jesus.

JESUS, SAYINGS OF: See entry for Q.

JESUS’S CHILDREN The Cathari held that Jesus, instead of dying on the cross, married Mary Magdalen, settled in the Languedoc, and that their heirs founded the Merovingian dynasty that united Christian Europe under Charlemagne. (See Catharism.)

Jeter, Michael (1952— ) Jeter, a television star, won a Tony Award for his acting on “Evening Shade.” He has appeared in “Boys in the Band,” “The Naked Man,” and “Jakob the Liar.” Also, he appeared in the Milos Forman movie version of “Hair.” A person who can discuss Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Proust, Eudora Welty, Dame Maggie Smith, and the U. S. Constitution “without missing a beat,” he has gone on record concerning the Bible:

I defy the church’s authority to tell me how I can be or how I can live. Anyway, I don’t believe in that god. Because he’s only had one bestseller. My god is the fucking Barbara Cartland of gods!

In 1996, Jeter was diagnosed as being HIV-positive and has been an AIDS activist. {Peter Kurth, Poz, January 1998}

Jeter, Michael (26 Aug 1952 - ) Jeter, a television star, won a Tony Award for his acting on Evening Shade. He has appeared in Boys in the Band, The Naked Man, and Jakob the Liar. Also, he appeared in the Milos Forman movie version of Hair. A person who can discuss Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Proust, Eudora Welty, Dame Maggie Smith, and the U. S. Constitution “without missing a beat,” he has gone on record concerning the Bible:

I defy the church’s authority to tell me how I can be or how I can live. Anyway, I don’t believe in that god. Because he’s only had one bestseller. My god is the fucking Barbara Cartland of gods!

Diagnosed in 1996 as being HIV-positive, Jeter is an AIDS activist.

{Peter Kurth, Poz, January 1998}

JEW Under Mosaic law and Israel’s Law of Return (but not the Nuremberg Laws), an individual is not Jewish unless he or she came by it through the maternal line. Christians and Muslims can be Christians and Muslims, however, even if their mother was an atheist, a Jew, a Hindu. What these two groups find confusing, then, is that some Jews say they are atheists, although one cannot logically be a Christian nor a Muslim atheist nor can one logically be both a believer in the Bible and a disbeliever in its contents. Judaism, as a term, was coined by Greek-speaking Jews to designate their religious way of life in contrast with that of their neighbors, a way of life known as Hellenism. Many chose pagan Greek over religious Hebrew, sometimes calling themselves “cultural Jews.” During World War II, “the Jewish race” was a factor cited by some officials of the Axis alliance powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan, although they did not speak of “the Catholic race” or “the Methodist race.” The Union of Orthodox Rabbis in the United States and Canada, which has a membership of more than five hundred, declared in 1997 that the Reform and Conservative movements are “not Judaism” and urged Jews not to attend synagogues affiliated with those movements. In Israel Reform and Conservative movements have few members, the population being divided between a secular majority and a large Orthodox minority. In their announcement, the Orthodox Rabbis did not suggest that Jews in Reform and Conservative synagogues were any less Jewish than those in Orthodox synagogues. But the charge was that they are spiritually misleading their members by teaching “things contrary to the Torah.” For example, religious law was being violated by rabbis’ allowing Jews to drive on the Sabbath, and by the Reform movement’s 1983 decision to recognize as Jews the offspring of interfaith marriages in which either the father or mother was Jewish. Previously, all branches had agreed that Jewish identity was solely derived from the mother. The Union’s statement led to continuing differences between the groups, some accusing its leaders of “sheer chutzpah.” In contemporary Israel, according to Deborah Sontag (The New York Times, 27 January 1999), “Sephardic Jews constitute nearly half the population. . . . The rift between the Ashkenazi elite—Jews of Central and Eastern European descent—and the immigrants from North Africa and Arab countries is a fact of Israeli life. . . . What used to be considered a taboo, intermarriage—as it was called—between Ashkenazis and Sephardis, has lost its shock value. Pop music from North Africa, which used to be sold only at cassette stands at bus stations, dominates the radio airwaves. A quarter of the university students are Sephardic. And the army has become a path of social mobility.” [The present work takes the position that Judaism, like Christianity, is a religion, that its adherents are not classifiable by race, and that one can convert to Judaism, Islam, Christianity, or any other organized religion. Similarly, one can switch from any organized religion to non-theism. Entertainer Sammy Davis, a black whose lineage was African, converted to Judaism. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, was the son of Jewish parents. Isaac Asimov, whose parents were Jewish, became a non-theist and secular humanist. The U.S. Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had Czech parents and grandparents who were Jewish, but her parents converted to Roman Catholicism in order to escape detection by the Nazis; Ms. Albright later converted to Protestant Episcopalianism. The son of atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair converted to Christianity.] Atheists like to point out that all humans, fortunately, are born without a belief in any organized religion’s doctrines. Concerning the view that being a Jew is dependent upon his or her mother’s being a Jew, a Manhattan wag has observed, “What an imaginative marketing program!”

JEW OF MALTA: See entry for Barabas.

JEW, AUTHENTIC • In the popular vernacular, a Jew is a member of a widely dispersed group that originally descended from the ancient Hebrews and shares an ethnic heritage which is based on Judaism. Thus, someone whose grandparents were Jews but who is not a religious person is still considered by them to be a Jew, possibly even an atheistic Jew.

• But to those purists who distinguish between a Jew (a member of the religion) and a Hebrew (a member of or a descendant from one of a group of northern Semitic peoples including the Israelites), Einstein was a Hebrew, not a Jew. In short, not all Hebrews are Jews, just as not all Italians are Catholics. Nor are all Norwegians Evangelical Lutherans. The African American entertainer Sammy Davis was not a Hebrew but became a Jew. Einstein’s parents, however, were Hebrews as well as Jews. This distinction is made throughout the present work to differentiate (a) the religious Jew who attends a synagogue regularly, (b) the non-religious Jew who feels a closeness to Judaism but does not participate actively, and (c) the Hebrew, whose ancestors were Jewish and who may or may not now be a religious or a non-religious Jew. Many people who are Hebrews, in short, are Jews as were their ancestors, just as many Norwegians are Lutherans, as were their ancestors. Other Hebrews as well as other Norwegians, however, are freethinkers, atheists, or uninterested either in religion or philosophy. The present work considers “atheistic Jew,” “atheistic Catholic,” and “atheistic Lutheran” oxymorons because of the contradictory terms.

• Only five “Jews” flatly turned down the chance to appear in a 1996 Life article which featured Frederic Brenner’s photographic homage to American Jews. It was not clear if they objected to being labeled a Jew or whether they considered themselves just an American of Hebrew ethnicity: Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Sandy Koufax, Paul Simon, and Barbara Walters. Those who did agree to be photographed included Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, Kirk Douglas, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Walter Annenberg, Michael Milken, Michael Ovitz, Henry Kissinger, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Beverly Sills.

• When French photographer Frédéric Brenner, author of Jews/America/A Representation, assembled Jews for a 1996 photo in New York City, he chose Lauren Bacall, Edgar Bronfman, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Charles Bronfman, Betty Friedan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Philip Glass, Edward I. Koch, Ralph Lauren, Roy Lichtenstein, Arthur Miller, Itzhak Perlman, Mark Spitz, Isaac Stern, Laurence and Preston Tisch, and Ruth Westheimer. Those unable to attend were Saul Bellow, Kirk Douglas, Allen Ginsberg, Dustin Hoffman, Henry Kissinger, Michael Milken, Philip Roth, Steven Spielberg, Michael Ovitz, and Barbra Streisand.

Jean-Paul Sartre distinguished between an “inauthentic Jew” and an “authentic Jew.” The former suppressed his or her “Jewishness.” The latter proclaimed it and fought against those who objected. In 1997, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supported legislation that allowed Orthodox rabbis in Israel to define who is a “Jew.” Also, he favored giving Orthodox rabbis even more control over Israel’s religious life. Inasmuch as more than 90% of Jews in the United States belong to non-Orthodox branches of Judaism, Netanyahu’s stand was protested.

JEW, CULTURAL In the common vernacular, a person whose ethnic heritage is based on Judaism but who is not religious and likely is anti-religious can still think of himself or herself as being culturally Jewish. Similarly, a Louisianan whose ancestors were Catholic, French-speaking immigrants from Acadia might think of himself or herself as culturally Cajun even if being a Jew and unable to speak French. However, many non-theists whose parents were Jews are adamantly opposed to being considered culturally Jewish, do not purchase “kosher food,” and are as unwilling to display a menorah as a Christian icon.

JEW, THE VANISHING Alan M. Dershowitz, in The Vanishing American Jew (1997) warned that if intermarriage trends continue, American Jewry would disappear. His book was written after his son Jamin married Barbara, a Roman Catholic. Raised an Orthodox Jew, Dershowitz surprised some by writing that Judaism need not be bound to revelation at Sinai or to Jewish law, a view similar to that of Mordechai Kaplan, to whom he alluded. “The great paradox of Jewish life is that virtually all of the positive values we identify with Jews—compassion, creativity, contributions to the world at large, charity, a quest for education—seem more characteristic of Jews who are closer to the secular end of the Jewish continuum than to the ultra-Orthodox end.” Dershowitz considers Judaism as a civilization like “the American, Greek, or Roman civilizations.” {See entry for Jew, Who Is A?}

JEW, WHO IS A? Paul Kurtz is a secular humanist leader with an incisive view about “Who is A Jew?” In a work of that title (Free Inquiry, Summer 1997), he noted that Alan M. Dershowitz’s The Vanishing American Jew (1997) writes that he is a thoroughly secularized Jew and a humanist, and he is agnostic about the existence of God. “Yet,” Kurtz found, “he believes that it would be a tragedy if the American Jews were to decline or disappear.” On the contrary, Kurtz defends assimilation of Jews into the mainstream:

In reading Dershowitz I am struck by how deep-seated his own ethnic and tribal chauvinism is—and by his failure to appreciate the virtues of assimilation, the appeal of interreligious and/or interracial marriages. The United States (and Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Western Europe to a lesser extent) are becoming truly universal societies, for they have taken steps beyond ancient ethnic, national, and racial chauvinism. Should we not applaud those couples (including Dershowitz’s son and daughter-in-law) who are willing to transcend their ethnic backgrounds and transfer their affection to the broader human community, able to reach out and love “the aliens” in their midst? Rather than bemoan the loss of his grandchildren to Jewish identity, why not applaud the quest for a broader human identity?

Kurtz further discussed the concept that the Jewish people “represent a continuous line of descent of 3,500 years, traceable back to the original Jews or Hebrew who lived in Palestine.” Citing Paul Wexler’s The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity (1993), Kurtz found no “sacred chain” to uphold the view of any continuous line of descent. The implications of Wexler’s study for the State of Israel, he states,

are profound. Jewish nationalism and Zionist ideology are wedded to “the sacred chain” thesis. Wexler observes that, given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, the belief in an uninterrupted identity of the Jewish people and/or religion from the Palestinian period to the present impedes the systematic study of this historic Judaization process. If he is correct, this thesis need not justify the frenzied effort by Palestinian nationalists to throw the Jews into the sea, no more than that Native Americans need insist that the settlers in America and Canada return to Europe and Africa, or that the Australians give back Australia to the Aborigines.

From the secular humanist viewpoint, Kurtz concluded,

. . . assimilation is a positive good and is not to be feared. The moral agenda for humanists is to persuade people that we need to go beyond the ancient divisive loyalties of the past and to attain a new ethical level in which all persons become a part of the community of humankind. This may be difficult. But if it is happening in America, why not elsewhere?

At the very end of 1998, a district judge in Jerusalem ordered the Israeli Government to recognize conversiions to Judaism performed by non-Orthodox rabbis. Minority Reform and Conservative leaders celebrated the decision. Orthodox leaders vowed to fight the ruling.

JEWISH ATHEISM S. Levin, a South African pediatrician who has written (New Humanist, May 1995) about “Jewish Atheism,” cites various biblical references to a non-caring, non-acting, not-there God. The Talmud does not feature God prominently, he notes, and he develops further evidence in the writing of Jewish authors that God could not exist or the Holocaust, for example, would never have been allowed. From a semantic rather than an orthodox Jewish viewpoint, “Jewish atheism” and “Catholic atheism,” which are analogous terms, appear to be illogical. Judaism is about a personal God, a chosen people, daily prayers and rituals, a sacred text, belief in a soul, and separation of the sacred from the secular. Those whose parents were Hebrews and who now do not accept Judaism could, however, consider themselves “cultural Jews” who, for example, like matzo ball soup and sad songs sung by a cantor. Similarly, those whose parents were Catholics and who now do not accept Christianity could, however, enjoy Gothic architecture and solemn liturgical music sung by castrati. Shulamit Aloni, the Israeli minister of science during the Peres regime, has called herself an Israeli (whose parents were Hebrews), a Jew, and an atheist. “A Jew by birth” is one whose mother was a Jew, according to Jewish religious law. Thus, if one’s mother is a Jew and one later becomes a Catholic or an atheist the question of whether or not one is still a Jew remains a problem often debated in contemporary Israel. Orthodox rabbis, who in Israel control marriages and burials, may not recognize such individuals as Jews. Nat Henthoff, Wendy Lesser, and numerous others insist they are “atheistic Jews,” not atheists whose parents were Jews. Meanwhile, if one’s mother is a Buddhist or a Baptist or an atheist, one is not automatically a Buddhist, Baptist, or atheist, for the person is expected to choose his religion or non-religion. Many, however, lazily continue without questioning their membership in their parents’ religion. (See entry for Jews and Jews, Cultural.)

JEWISH AUTHORS Many Jewish creative artists incorporate religious themes and references in their work. The British Commonwealth’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has written Faith in the Future (1995), and numbers of Jews over the centuries have produced not only novels, dramas, and poetry but also symphonies, paintings, and sculpture. Hebrew literature starts with the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, parts of the Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Talmud, the Midrash, the Targum, the Masora, the Zohar, the Aha of Shabcha, Saadia Ben Joseph Al-Fayumi, Dunash Den Tamin, Dunash Ben Labrat, Gershom Ben Judah, and Al-Fasi exemplify Hebrew literature up to the 14th century. Following the Crusades when the Jews were driven from country to country, they continued, often writing about mysticism and asceticism. The modern period of Hebrew literature began with Moses Mendelssohn, the poet Jehuda (Leon) Gordon, and the novelist Solomon Yakob Abramovich. Other writers are the scholar Joseph Halévy, Ahad Ha-am (Asher Ginzberg), Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Abraham Shlonsky, Lea Goldberg, Nathan Alterman, Joseph H. Brenner, Salman Shneur, the Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon, Moshe Shamir, Aron David Gordon, David Frishman, Yosef Klausner, Amos Oz, Abraham B. Yehoshua, Aharon Applefeld, Yehuda Amichai, et cetera. Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22 (1961), has explained his view on being a Jewish author:

Being Jewish informs everything I do. My books are getting more and more Jewish. But I write for everybody, and there is possibly something exotic about Jewish books for non-Jews, although fortunately Jews in America do buy books. New York, when I was growing up, was the biggest city in America, and consequently had more educated people than any other city, and had more Jews living there, so it is not surprising that there were so many books about Jews.

His Good as Gold (1979) is comically satirical about Jewish New York and Washington politics. Max Frankel, in Max Frankel, the Times of My Life (1999), sounded almost like, and might even be, a secular humanist:

Like my forebears in the shtetl, I understood my God to be an abstraction, without image, and I defined godliness as the pursuit of knowledge and good deeds. In my editorial combats with fellow Jews, I realize why I grew to define myself through journalism: because I shared the faith of the shtetl that “the word is threshold to the deed,” and because I wanted always to escape the irrationality of the herd. Although I am sentimentally faithful to the tribe whose genes I carry, I know that my culture has been both diluted and enriched by a dozen other tribes. If my Yiddishkayt is to survive in America, it will be as a value system, not in a taste for bagels and log or a guilty twitch at the sight of bacon.

Other contemporary authors have made Judaism a part of their work. For example, Saul Bellow in Herzog (1964) tells of the inner life of a Jewish intellectual. Arthur Miller, without specifically naming Judaism, includes his views on moralism and materialism in Death of a Salesman (1949), All My Sons (1947), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955); his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, however, was performed by a Connecticut minister, a Unitarian. Philip Roth in most of his works describes his complex relationship with his Jewish background, works which often have aroused controversy by his portrayal of contemporary Jewish life. Norman Mailer, who has called himself an atheist, condemned Christianity in his Christians and Cannibals. Irwin Shaw in The Young Lions (1948) describes two American soldiers, one a Jew, the other a Gentile, and tells how the Nazi who killed the first is killed by the second. Herman Wouk in Marjorie Morningstar (1955) describes a Jewish girl’s quest for romance and the career of acting, finally settling down as a New Jersey matron. Wouk, a rabbi, also wrote This Is My God (1959), a book about Judaism.

	Alfred Kazin (1915—1998), author of New York Jew (1978), was a noted critic whose study of American prose literature starting with William Dean Howells was an important work entitled On Native Grounds (1942). Although thought perhaps to be a non-believer in the supernatural and afterlife, he wrote in A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996), “We Jewish intellectuals are always looking for our cultural home.” In God & The American Writer (1997), he discussed how writers of fiction make searches for the unexplainable, citing Emerson (who “began as a religion but ended as literature”), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville, Whitman, Lincoln (as a writer), Emily Dickinson, William James (who saw religion “as therapy”), Clemens, Eliot, Frost, Faulkner, and others. (See entries for Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller.) (CE; OEL}

JEWISH HUMANIST On the staff of The Jewish Humanist (Birmingham Temple, 28611 West 12 Mile Road, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48335) are the following: Rabbi Sherman T. Wine; President Carolyn Borman; Vice President Michael Egren; Treasurer Mark Bulmash; and Secretary Edie Mellow. Past presidents have been Charles Paul, Stuart Rice, Lori Schechter, Judith Schneider, Nina Schneyer, and Robert Stone.

JEWISH NOSE

“. . . [T]he man on the cross had a Jewish nose,” ex-Jesuit Peter de Rosa maliciously observed in 1988. The Hittites, an ancient people of Asia Minor and Syria known for being one of the first to successfully smelt iron, are said by anatomists often to have had a “beaked nose.” The Caucasoid race is said usually to have a high nose bridge, the Mongoloid race to have a medium or low nose bridge, and the Negroid race a low nose bridge. Inasmuch as race is scientifically inappropriate when applied to national, religious, geographic, linguistic, or cultural groups, it is not clear how one would or could identify a Jewish, a Catholic, a Hindu, or a non-theistic nose. However, David Denby in The New Yorker 17 August 1998) described Leonard Bernstein as having “a virile Jewish beak.” “Even when the males are naked,” a non-circumcised Manhattan atheist wag observed, “you can’t be sure they’re Jews. You can be fairly sure, however, if they’re not.” {CE}

JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS Four major Jewish organizations are in the United States. The two largest, numbering around 1,500,000 each, are the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform) and the United Synagogues of Conservative Judaism. An estimated 500,000 are members of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. The Jewish Reconstructionist Federation is at 165 East 56th Street, New York, NY 10022

JEWISH PHILOSOPHY: See entry in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4.

JEWS Jews are members of the tribe of Judah, whose religion is Judaism. By definition, Judaism is a religion developed among the ancient Hebrews, one that believes in one transcendent God who has revealed Himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets. Although it is possible to convert to Judaism and become a Jew regardless of race or previous religion, it is lexicographically illogical to be an “atheistic Jew,” just as, analogously, one is not an “atheistic Christian” or an “atheistic Muslim.” However, many whose ancestors were Hebrews, including Nat Henthoff, persist in proclaiming that they are atheistic Jews rather than (as were Freud, Einstein, and others) “unbelieving Jews.” Anne Frank’s father, who served the Kaiser in World War I and who escaped to Holland when anti-Semitism became the national policy in Germany, was called a Jew by others although he did not call himself so—his family celebrated Christmas, not Chanukah; his family had not given him any religious instruction, and his children received no religious or theological instruction. Nel Noddings, in Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993), remarks, “Christianity, it is said, focuses on belief more than most religions do. Judaism, for example, places more importance on ritual and practice. Indeed, some people today ignore the religious nature of Judaism entirely. In a letter to the Village Voice (9 June 1992), Nat Hentoff declared himself a ‘Jewish atheist,’ ” adding that the present writer retorted, “Hentoff cannot be a Jewish atheist any more than one could be a ‘black white,’ that he might better call himself a secular humanist or just an atheist. Hentoff, who perhaps could better be described as a non-Jewish Jew, replied:

I have now come full circle. Several rabbis once “excommunicated” me because I am for an independent Palestinian state. Now the secular humanists would censure me for calling myself Jewish. As I told the rabbis, I define myself, and it ain’t nobody’s business but my own.

Nodding observes, “Perhaps Hentoff should settle for the label ‘existentialist.’ In any case, the Hentoff-Smith exchange illustrates the fascinating mixture of belief, culture, politics, logic, and passion that is conjured up by the word religion. Even though few religions besides Christianity use belief as a basic test, belief is clearly involved in all religions. People do not engage in rituals and practices without believing in something that gives these rituals and practices meaning. At least, I am arguing here that such behavior would not be intelligent.” In 1995, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, who was “born a Jew” and converted at the age of fourteen to Roman Catholicism in 1940, created a furore when he visited Yad Vashem, a memorial in Jerusalem to the Holocaust. Now the Archbishop of Paris, he wore the red zucchetto of a prince of the Roman Catholic Church. But, he was met by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau’s statement that Cardinal Lustiger had “betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods. If we were to accept Lustiger as a model,” he said, “not one Jew would be left in the world to say Kaddish,” the Jewish prayer for the dead. The Cardinal insisted that he had never repudiated his Jewish origins and even referred to “we Jews,” adding, “To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.” In short, instead of claiming he was from a Hebrew family, he said he was both a Jew and a Catholic. When asked if he thought he might become the next Pope, he answered “Crazy” in Yiddish, “Meshuggeh!” The Reform branch of American Judaism in the 1980s renounced a principle which had guided Jews for 2,000 years: that in mixed marriages the religious status of children comes down through the mother. Thus, Peter Steinfels has explained, “the child of a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish man, therefore, was automatically Jewish, while the child of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman was not,” possibly ordained because rabbis took pity on the Jewish women raped by Roman soldiers during the Jewish uprisings of 65-67 C.E. and 132-135 C.E. After all, had not Moses married Zipporah, a Midianite daughter of a foreign priest, and it was never suggested that her son Gershom or any other of her children were not Jews. Test cases include “a Carmelite monk who in the 1960s claimed Israeli citizenship inasmuch as he had been born a Jew. In 1970, an Israeli married to a gentile demanded that his children be recognized as Jewish by race but not by religion. In 1986, an American immigrant, converted to Judaism by a non-Orthodox rabbi, claimed a right to be recognised as Jewish,” reported The Economist (14 August 1993). In the 1990s, a group of black Somali refugees encamped outside an Israeli embassy, describing themselves as Falasha Somali and asserting their own ancient Jewish lineage. Meanwhile, a black Ethiopian group called the Semitic People of Guihon and claiming to number four million have proclaimed their group’s Jewishness. Opponents claim that such examples only prove that the Reform rule deepens the rift among Jews, blurring the boundary between Jews and non-Jews. The main designations of Judaism are Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and Reconstructionist. (See entries for Jew—Authentic, Judaism, Mankind., and Jew, Who is A? Also see entry for Sheldon F. Gottlieb, who declares that “Jews may relinquish the deistic aspects of the religion and still consider themselves to be culturally and ethnically Jewish.” Also see the entry for Thomas Henry Huxley, who told his son Leonard, “The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions.” In addition, Joseph McCabe in the Rationalist Encyclopedia has a precise survey of Jews and Judaism. For an estimate of the number of Jews worldwide, see entry for Hell.) {CE; RE}

JEWS AND DNA “DNA BACKS A TRIBE’S TRADITION OF EARLY DESCENT FROM THE JEWS” was the headline in the New York Times (9 May 1999). The reference was to Bantu-speaking, black people of southern Africa, the Lemba, who have a tradition of having been led out of Judea by a man named Buba. They practice circumcision, keep one day a week holy, and avoid eating pork or piglike animals “such as the hippopotamus.” A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, whom Jewish priests believe to be the descendants of Aaron. The theory of Dr. David Goldstein, a geneticist at Oxford University, is that the Lemba may have migrated to southern Africa from Senna in present-day Yemen. Freethinkers, who hold that Jews are members of a religion, not a race, are hard put to explain how one’s religion can be transmitted by one’s D(eoxyribo) N(ucleic) A(cid). {Nicolas Wade, The New York Times, 9 May 1999}

JEWS AND MENSTRUATION In 1648 there was a bizarre notion that Jewish men menstruated. Thomas Calvert claimed that Jews—men as well as females—are punished curso menstruo sanguinis—with a very frequent blood flux. This led to the blood-libel, a belief that Jews had to murder Christian children to provide themselves with blood for Passover matzos. Jewish men, in this belief that involved the subject of circumcision, collected blood to replace that lost through the perversion of their masculinity. (See entry for Jews, Blood Libel.) {James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (1997)}

JEWS FOR JESUS Jews for Jesus is a group which cites the Bible for believing that it is God Himself who makes one Jewish. It holds that “Jewishness does not depend on what you know or what you don’t believe or even on what you practice but on whether you follow the Jewish Messiah.” To be Jewish, it holds, is to believe in Jesus. The most Jewish thing a person can do, it is claimed, is to believe in Y’shua as Messiah. Moses wrote about his coming in Deuteronomy 18:18. Micah predicted his birth in Micah 5:2. Isaiah described how he would die for our sins in Isaiah 53. And King David wrote that he would not stay dead in Psalm 16:10. “Believing in Jesus makes us all (Jews and Gentiles) more of who God wants us to be and that is what is most important,” the San Francisco, California, based group preaches. On the Web: <http://www.jews-for-jesus.org>.

JEWS IN ISRAEL Orthodoxy is the established religion in Israel. The Conservative and Reform denominations have no formal standing in the Jewish state. For historical reasons primarily, Israelis are either Orthodox or secular. The non-Orthodox movements, which flourished in pre-Holocaust Germany and continue to flourish in America, have failed to win many Israelis. This they attribute to their “second-class” legal status, “their traducers to their essentially alien and diasporic character,” noted The Economist (21 June 1997). As a result, anyone converted in Israel by a non-Orthodox rabbi is not recognized as Jewish by the state—although, by a legal quirk, conversions done abroad are recognized.

JEWS, BLOOD LIBEL During the Renaissance, a widely held bizarre notion held that Jewish men menstruated. Thomas Calvert, writing in 1648, reported the claim that “Jews, men as well as females, are punished curso menstruo sanguinis, with a very frequent blood flux.” The blood-libel, the belief that Jews had to murder Christian children to provide themselves with the blood needed to make matzos for Passover, is bound up with this transgression of gender boundaries: Jewish men murder to collect blood to replace the blood they have lost through the perversion of their masculinity (circumcision). A similarly bizarre notion was that Jewish men were occasionally capable of breast-feeding. (See entry for Jews and Menstruation.) {Steven Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1997)}

JEWS, FACTIOUSNESS OF Three concepts of Jews are expressed in Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (1998) by Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer: the Chosen, the Factious, and the Other. The authors do not hold that Jews were chosen by divine whim. Abraham “first chose God” when he broke the idols of his father Terah, a story that appears to be rabbinic lore and is found nowhere in Genesi. Rather, the authors say that Jews elected themselves. The authors decry their factiousness, or their proclivity for fighting among themselves. Their otherness, however, includes being “the obdurate outsider,” both in their own minds and in the minds of others. Exodus to Humanism: Jewish Identity Without Religion (1999), edited by David Ibry, points out that genetic research has not detected any special form of DNA in Jews, then cites individuals who have exited Judaism and become humanists.

JEWS, ULTRA-ORTHODOX In 1997, when a group of Conservative and Reform Jews carried a Torah scroll to Jerusalem’s West Wall to mark Shavuot, a holiday commemorating Moses’s receiving of the Ten Commandments, ultra-Orthodox Jews were angered because of their belief that men and women must not pray and worship together. The wall is divided into prayer sections for men and women, with the view between the two sides blocked. When the one group of Jews arrived in front of the prayer area, the ultra-Orthodox Jews began shouting “Nazis! Christians! Whores! Goyim!” and hurled stones and bags of excrement at them from balconies of nearby yeshiva, a school of religious studies. {Associated Press, 12 June 1997}

Jeynes, Jennifer R. (20th Century) Jeynes, the librarian for the South Place Ethical Society, has studied the history of philosophy and science, written on relativism, and reviewed books for New Humanist. In 1996 she was elected a member of the Council of Management of the National Secular Society.

JHWH: See entry for God.

JH-NIEUWSBRIEF A humanistic publication for youths, JH-Nieuwsbrief is at P. O. Box 71, 1000 AB Amsterdam, The Netherlands

JIHAD A jihad in Islam is a holy war, a war ordained by God. The Qur’an teaches that soldiers who die in jihad go immediately to Heaven. {DCL}

JIJNASA (Inquiry) A Bengali quarterly, Jijnasa is at 15 Bankim Chatterjee Street, Calcutta 700 073, India.

Jillette, Penn Fraser (1955— ) Penn and Teller, magicians who have appeared on Broadway as well as throughout the nation, are known for including a touch of blasphemy in their performances. Teller, the quiet one who makes noise only when he plays the piano, is the partner of Penn, who delights in talking while the extraordinary tricks are performed to audiences unable to fathom how the magic is possible. From 1982 to 1984, he played bass in the New Christian Right Wing Band, at the same time sporting his “Team Satan 666” T-shirt. Told that Time’s cover featured “10 Top Scientists Talk About Why They Believe in God,” Jillette joked, “How come these ten top scientists are all teaching at community colleges?” Commented Joshua Quittner in Wired, “Penn is such an ardent atheist he refuses to go to weddings.” In PC Computing (December 1991), Penn irked some readers with his freethinking. He described how a computer whiz has succeeded in producing a relatively complete text of the secret Dead Sea Scrolls by using a computer. Jillette concludes from this that the scrolls were authored by “some right-wing Jewish hermits” called Essenes. As for scholars needing forty years to release the contents of those scrolls, Jillette asks, “How long can it take to copy a few jugs full of smelly parchment?” As to who could be entrusted to receive the scrolls, Jillette quotes a UPI story that they not be turned over “to anyone who is circumcised.” And what is it in the scrolls which is so controversial? Jillette has the answer: The text is mostly “rules for the religiously proper way to urinate in the desert.” {CA; E; Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb 1997} Penn is the loud half of Penn & Teller. They perform their irreverent magic act regularly in Las Vegas and major venues around the world.

Both are very outspoken about being atheists and skeptics. They use it as part of the act.

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"Penn is such an ardent atheist he refuses to go to weddings" writes Joshua Quittner in a PJ profile in WIRED 2.09.

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Back in 1996, a contributor reports that Penn wears his "Team Satan 666" shirt everywhere.

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Penn was interviewed in The Onion (1999?):

[...]being pro-science is one of the oddest things you can do in show business. Which is very strange, because it was science that, oh, cured polio. I could list others--isn't that enough? [Laughs.] Oh, Western medicine doesn't work; I'm sorry, we cured polio. What more do you want? Your herbalism has done jack; we cured polio. And guess what? It cures polio even if you don't believe in it. We don't have it on Earth anymore. And then there's also small pox, and then there's mostly dysentery, and we haven't even gotten into the stuff we're good at, which is physics. We're not good at medicine; we're good at physics. We were good at physics in the 20th century; in the 21st century, one would hope, we'll be good at medicine. But we [Penn & Teller] are pro-science, and when you're pro-science, that means you're an atheist, by definition, because religion... No matter how much they put "10 Top Scientists Talk About Why They Believe In God" on the cover of TIME magazine, you kind of have to look and go, "How come these 10 top scientists are all teaching at community colleges?"

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Penn recounts a 1998 appearance on Donny and Marie Osmond's syndicated talkshow: We were asked to do autographs for Donny and Marie. I wrote, "There is no god," and Teller wrote, "He's right."

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P&T have an extensive home on the web at http://www.sincity.com.

Jillette, Penn Fraser (5 Mar 1955 - ) In 1985 when Penn & Teller opened off-Broadway, their magic and comedy act led them to appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and Miami Vice. They became guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Live! with Regis & Kathie Lee, and they are often seen on other television shows. The 1985 PBS special, Penn & Teller Go Public, won two Emmys and the International Golden Rose. Other television projects have included Emmy-nominated variety series Penn & Teller’s Sin City Spectacular, the ABC special Penn & Teller's Home Invasion, the Showtime movie Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread, the NBC special Don't Try This At Home, the PBS Children’s series Behind The Scenes, and The Unpleasant World of Penn & Teller and Penn & Teller's Phobophilia, both for Britain's Channel 4. Penn & Teller Get Killed, directed by Arthur Penn, saw the pair in their big screen debut. Together they wrote Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends, How To Play With Your Food, and How To Play in Traffic. During a 1998 appearance on Donny and Marie Osmond's syndicated talkshow, the two were asked to do autographs for Donny and Marie. Penn wrote, "There is no god," and Teller wrote, "He's right." The two magicians, who have appeared on Broadway as well as throughout the nation, are known for including a touch of blasphemy in their performances. Teller, the quiet one who makes noise only when he plays the piano, is the partner of Penn, who delights in talking while the extraordinary tricks are performed to audiences unable to fathom how the magic is possible. From 1982 to 1984, he played bass in the New Christian Right Wing Band, at the same time sporting his “Team Satan 666” T-shirt. Told that Time’s cover featured “10 Top Scientists Talk About Why They Believe in God,” Jillette joked, “How come these ten top scientists are all teaching at community colleges?” “Penn is such an ardent atheist," wrote Joshua Quittner in Wired, "he refuses to go to weddings.” In PC Computing (December 1991), Penn irked some readers with his freethinking. He described how a computer whiz has succeeded in producing a relatively complete text of the secret Dead Sea Scrolls by using a computer. Jillette concludes from this that the scrolls were authored by “some right-wing Jewish hermits” called Essenes. As for scholars needing forty years to release the contents of those scrolls, Jillette asks, “How long can it take to copy a few jugs full of smelly parchment?” As to who could be entrusted to receive the scrolls, Jillette quotes a UPI story that they not be turned over “to anyone who is circumcised.” And what is it in the scrolls which is so controversial? Jillette has the answer: The text is mostly “rules for the religiously proper way to urinate in the desert.” {CA; E; Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb 1997}

Jimenez, Sheila (20th Century) Jimenez is managing editor of World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Jin, Xing (1968 - ) China’s celebrated modern dancer, born in Guandong in 1969, is fluent in five languages and has been described by international critics as being a world-class dancer. Jin, when nine, started a hunger strike to convince his father, a military man, to help him enroll in the Chinese army’s dance school, and he succeeded by entertaining the nation’s troops. Upon receiving a scholarship to New York, he studied with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and José Limon. Here, according to Sylvie Levey in London’s Daily Mirror, he was “introduced to an alternative lifestyle in the gay bars on Broadway.” But although from the age of six he had felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, he did not feel like a homosexual. What he felt, however, was a need to have a sex change. A colonel in the Shenyang Military Dance Troupe, Jin (xing means star) had the sex change and became in China and elsewhere a transsexual modern-dance icon, acclaimed in New York, Rome, Brussels, and elsewhere. In New York, her “Half Dream” won her the award for best choreographer at the American Dance Festival. “Like my sex change operation, people ask if I did it for a man; there’s no man in the universe that I would do that for; it’s for me. I am not lying to myself. I did it for myself; it’s my life,” she has said. After dancing throughout Europe and managing her own dance company in Beijing, she lives in Shanghai with her production, Shanghai Tango. To reporters she has said that she wants to internationalize Shanghai’s art scene, and she has arranged a twenty-city tour with Carmena Burrana and dancers from her company and others from abroad to show Western opera to Chinese audiences. She has had many offers to choreograph new works, is the owner of a bar-restaurant, has appeared in a joint Hungarian-Chinese film production, and has auditioned in another production for the role of Madame Mao Zedong. While a high-ranking military officer, appearing before high-ranking representatives of the Communist Party who were dressed to the nines to watch her perform from their front-row seats, Jin actively showed her humanism to be humanities-centered: dance. (On the Web: <http://www.geocities.com/lorna_lynne/jin_xing.html>) {E; World Press Review (August 2001).

“JINGLE BELLS”: See entry for the composer, James Lord Pierpont.

Joad, C. E. M. (1891—1953) Joad, a well-known radio personage, was a humanist who from 1941 to 1944 was a lecturer at South Place Ethical Society in London. He was a vocal advocate of scientific humanism. {FUK; TRI}

Joan [Pope) McCabe relates in his Rationalist Encyclopedia the following: “In the Middle Ages, especially in the licentious period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, when every kind of sex-story was relished, the legend of a female Pope, who embarrassed the Papal Court by her pregnancy, was very popular. Her ‘pontificate’ was said to be from 855 to 858, which, we have every reason to believe, was, as stated in all lists of the Popes, the period of the pontificate of Benedict III. The Papal Court was in fact gross and half-barbaric, as is described by the monk-secretary of Charlemagne, Eginhard, in his Annals, but it was not until centuries later that the lascivious story of Joan appeared. The real interest of it is that it was extraordinarily popular during just those centuries when the Church is supposed to have kept Europe pious, virtuous, and devoted to the Papacy; so popular that Joan was included in the series of busts of Popes in Siena Cathedral. The statement that from 858 onward the cardinals took measures to verify the sex of a candidate for the Papacy just, like the legend of Joan, be regarded as popular fiction of the erotic later Middle Ages.” {RE}

Joan of Arc A 1996 poll concerning religious beliefs showed that 10% of Americans think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (See entry for Dostoyevsky’s Epilepsy.) {The Economist, 18 January 1997}

Jodl, Friedrich (1849—1914) 

In 1894, with Marianne Hainisch, Jodl founded the Austrian ethical community. He was influenced by Mill and Comte and Spencer in his earlier years and remained agnostic in regard to the existence of higher powers. {RAT; TRI}

Joel, William Martin (Billy) (1929— ) Joel, a popular musician and recording artist once married to Christie Brinkley, has won several Grammy awards and is known for songs such as “Just the Way You Are,” “Honesty,” “Piano Man,” “Streetlife Serenade,” “Turnstiles,” “The Stranger,” “52nd Street,” “Glass Houses,” “Songs in the Attic,” “The Nylon Curtain,” “An Innocent Man,” and “The Bridge.” To a Knight-Ridder newspaper reporter, he said that his “River of Dreams” album (1993) is “the most personal writing I’ve ever done,” that it “begins with a crisis of faith, a search for justice. In the end the guy realizes there’s no justice, only faith.” But, adding that he is an avowed atheist, Joel said he was not referring to a faith in God “but faith in humanity, judgment, your fellow man, in your ability to do your work, faith in the ground you walk on. Faith that you won’t get shot when you walk out the door, that you won’t drop dead.” He also said that when he becomes depressed, he studies the classics and the serious piano works his father, a German-born survivor of concentration camps, had played and encouraged him to pursue. Although his grandfather, Phillip Hyman, was a staunch atheist, Joel as a child was baptized at an evangelical church, the Church of Jesus Christ. When one day the preacher unfolded a dollar bill, saying, “This is the flag of the Jews,” his family left the church. The best present he ever got at Christmastime, he has said, was Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, the tale in which Satan, appearing as a morally indifferent but life-enhancing visitor, reveals the hypocrisies and stupidities of a small town. Although freethinkers suspect Joel is an agnostic, not an atheist, they question his wishing people friendly God-bless-you’s. {CA; E; OEL}

Jogand-Pages, Gabriel (20th Century) A freethinker in the Netherlands, Jogand-Pages wrote The Amusing Bible (1950). {GS}

Johanson, Donald Carl (1943— )

	A physical anthropologist, Johanson since 1981 has been president of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California. He taught anthropology at Stanford University (1983—1989), at Case Western Reserve University (1978—1981), and Kent State University (1978—1981). With M. A. Edey, he wrote Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (1982); with James Shreeve, Lucy’s Child: Discovering a Human Ancestor (1989); and with Kevin O’Farrell, Journey from the Dawn (1990). In 1996 he wrote From Lucy to Language. Johanson was producer of the films “The First Family” (1981) and “Lucy in Disguise” (1982). In 1983 Johanson was named Humanist Laureate in Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. 

John Paul I (Pope) (1912-1978) An Italian named Albino Luciani, John Paul I died one month after succeeding to the papacy. According to Quentin Crisp, the pope died suspiciously because his tea had been poisoned by someone in the Vatican. A subsequent cover-up, he claimed, was successfully covered up. A 1984 book, In God’s Name by David Yallop, alleged that the Italian mob killed the pope, noting that the Vatican’s tradition of having no autopsy helped hide the fact. Cardinal Aloisio Lorschelder, the pontiff’s choice to succeed him, questioned the death, saying in August 1998, “I have to say that a suspicion remains in our hearts.” In 1999 singer Elton John purchased rights to Yallop’s best-selling work, saying he intended to make a movie about the mysterious death. (See entry for Quentin Crisp ) {New York Daily News, 16 February 1999}

John Paul II: See entry for Stanislaw Lem. John XII (Pope) (c. 937—964) John XII was Pope from 955 to 964. In the historian Gibbon’s words, “We read with some surprise that Pope John XII lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome; that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for prostitution, and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.” John was mysteriously murdered.

John XXIII (Antipope) (c. 1370—1419) Baldasarre Cossa, before entering the service of the Church and becoming the antipope John XXIII (1410-1415), was both a homosexual and a pirate. He had been made a cardinal by Boniface IX and was said to have been able, especially in financial matters. Held prisoner in Germany until released by Martin V in 1418, he died cardinal bishop of Tusculum. His reputation was one of unscrupulousness and self-aggrandizement. (See entry for Pirates.) {CE; Lavender Lists, Alyson Publications, 1990}

John, Roy (20th Century) John has been an activist member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

John, Christian (20th Century) John, a leader of German freethinkers, participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City.

Johnny Rotten: See entry for John Lydon.

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY ATHEISTS Johns Hopkins University Atheists are on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

Johnson, Alvin Walter (1895—1958) With Frank H. Yost, Johnson wrote Separation of Church and State in the United States (1948). {GS}

Johnson, B. C. (20th Century) Johnson is author of The Atheist Debater’s Handbook (1981). He provides many arguments against theism, presented particularly for debaters.

Johnson, Clara (20th Century) Johnson is a retired chemist, a feminist, an atheist, a writer, and a part-time owner of the Prairie Moon Feminist Bookstore of Arlington Heights, Illinois. For Freethought Today (May 1998), she wrote “Pope John—or Joan?”

Johnson, Claude (20th Century) A freethinker, Johnson wrote Human Religion (1917). {GS}

Johnson, David (20th Century) A Marxist, Johnson wrote poetry that deals centrally with atheist and materialistic themes.

Johnson, Don (20th Century) Johnson, the Senior Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City, took early retirement in 1998 and moved to his home in Asheville, North Carolina.

Johnson, Edna Ruth (20th Century) Johnson is on the editorial board of The Humanist. {HNS2}

Johnson, Ellen (1955— ) When Jon Garth Murray mysteriously disappeared in August 1995, along with his mother Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her granddaughter Robin Murray O’Hair, Johnson became temporary president of American Atheist Inc. A homemaker with two children, she assumed “foul play was involved” and took charge of the organization, refusing, however, to believe they were escaping Federal income tax bills and hiding in luxury somewhere. Johnson, with Ron Barrier, have a talk show, “Atheist Viewpoint,” in which they call Christians “sheep” and “idiots,” call television evangelists “bigots,” and mock religious rituals and tenets. According to journalist Barbara Stewart, Johnson terms agnostics “wimps” and reads Jon Garth Murray’s “Task of an Atheist” “as reverently as any Scripture quoting preacher.” Stewart in an interview was told that Johnson was reared as an atheist, that her parents never railed against religion, “They just never talked about it.” Johnson has supported O’Hair’s many lawsuits against the government: to remove prayer from space capsules and Nativity scenes from public property and paid chaplains from the military and “in God We Trust” from coins, to name a few. ‘Spike” Tyson, Atheist Inc.’s director, has said of her, “She’s an inspiring speaker. We giggle a lot about this absurd religion based on a myth and its ridiculous followers.” Atheists, Johnson states, should come out of the closet, just as homosexuals are doing. “I want to see a movement,” she has said. “I want atheists to do great things. I want them to get out and make a joyful noise for atheism.” As a result, she revived the American Atheist Newsletter and headed American Atheists. Meanwhile, Arnold Via told a Time reporter that “somebody’s not telling the truth about things somewhere along the line.” Of Johnson, Via added, “I can’t imagine anybody inheriting the presidency of an organization because the previous president absconded with $630,000 and not filling out a police report.” In 1999, she presided over an American Atheists Inc. meeting in Piscataway, New Jersey, the group’s new headquarters. Mail address: Box 5733, Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733. Web: <http://www.atheist.org>. {The New York Times, 26 January 1997; Time, 10 February 1997}

Johnson, Heidi (20th Century) Johnson, from Maryland, is on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Johnson, James Hervey (1964—1988) Johnson, an editor of The Truth Seeker following Charles Lee Smith, moved the magazine to San Diego, California, where it continued with Ian Hutton as editor. D. M. Bennett founded the magazine in 1873. Among Johnson’s books were Superior Men (1949) and Three Is No God (1952). The generous James H. Johnson Charitable Trust (Box 16160, San Diego, California 92176) contributed large funds to Council for Secular Humanism’s Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, as well as for the Center for Inquiry—West in Los Angeles, California. Allegedly a tightwad and misanthrope, according to journalist Mimi Swartz, Johnson had a fortune estimated at from $15 to $20 million. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was unsuccessful in getting him to join her, and in 1983 she angrily wrote him, “You are a dying, defunct, discredited old man who will grow moldy in an unmarked grave.” She then sent spies to infiltrate Johnson’s organizations, staging a coup at a 1987 Truth Seeker shareholders’ meeting and naming herself as chairman of the board. In 1988, he countersued but died the same year. {FUS}

Johnson, Jone (1951- ) Johnson, a Leader of the Northern Virginia Ethical Society (1997- ), is active in the American Ethical Union (AEU). She is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and a member of the faculty of the Humanist Institute. She was Leader of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (1991-1995) and minister in Michigan of the Berrien Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (1991-1993). Her humanistic inspirations include John Dietrich, Curtis Reese, and John Dewey, but also Anna Garlin Spencer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Jane Addams. Johnson has designed and maintains a number of websites related to humanism and “radical religion,” Including the following: • American Ethical Union <http://www.acu.org> • The Transcendentalists <http://www.freereligion.com> • Electronic Archives of Liberal Religion <http://www.jjnet.com/archives> • Famous Unitarians and Universalists <http://www.jjnet.com/emerson> • Notable Women with Liberal Religious Connections <http://www.geocities.com/~bread_n_roses> Johnson’s e-mail: <jj@pbat.com>. She is on the Web at <http://home.earthlink.net/~jone01/>.

Johnson, Matt: See entry for The The.

Johnson, Matt ( ) Johnson, who started playing the piano at the age of six, is a classically trained pianist born in Sherman, Texas. When seventeen, he formed the group known as The The. He received his Bachelor of Music degree in piano performance at Oklahoma Baptist University. When he was a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, he studied composition.with William Thomas McKinley and received his Master of Music degree in jazz studies and composition with a distinction in performance. A writer and performer who resides in Florida with his wife and three sons, he has appeared in venues from Boston to Rio de Janeiro. He has released five contemporary instrumental recordings of original compositions, including A Quiet Moment (1986); Something About the Moon (1989); Conversations (1992); End of a Day (1995); and Origins (2000). His music is neo-romantic, employing a blend of contemporary jazz, new age, popular, and classical elements. Johnson is a writer-member of ASCAP and, owning Dolce & Nuit Productions, is a publisher-member as well. He is director of music at a Florida church. During an online chat session in 1995 a participant observed that the song, "I Saw the Light," is a long way from "I ain't never been to church or believed in Jesus Christ." He asked Johnson how his religious feelings have changed over the years. Johnson’s reply: “I'm a born again agnostic!” {CA}

Johnson, Nic (20th Century) Johnson is president of Harvard’s Chaplaincy board.

Johnson, Oakley C. (20th Century) Johnson wrote Robert Owen in the United States (1970). {FUS}

Johnson, Philip Cortelyou (1906— ) Johnson, a major American architect and historian, is known for his minimalist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and for Manhattan’s Seagram Building, which he built with the collaboration of Miës van der Rohe. One biographer, Franz Shulze, has described Johnson’s attraction to the Nazi philosophy (writing in a 1939 The Examiner, “Reduced to plain terms, Hitler’s ‘racism’ is a perfectly simple though far-reaching idea. It is the myth of ‘we the best,’ which we find, more or less fully developed, in all vigorous cultures.”) and to his homosexuality (Schulze found that Johnson was attracted to the homoerotic undertones of Nazism, “all those blond boys in black leather. . . . He who had sweated and sighed in the arms of lovers hastily picked on the streets of Weimar Berlin . . . could be the most fastidiously self-abnegating puritan in his glass palace in Connecticut.”). In his eighties, Johnson when interviewed by Hilary Lewis and John O’Connor, stated: “My philosophical outlook dates from a time and a way of thinking that differs from the liberal, acceptable, politically correct line that we all subscribe to today. To me, Plato was the worst—living the good and the true and the beautiful. There’s no such thing as the good or the true or the beautiful. I’m a relativist. I’m a nihilist.” At the age of eighty-nine, he constructed near the Glass House an all-concrete, blood-red-and-black “Monsta,” a building which looks more like a sculpture than like a house. “It’s non-Euclidean . . . intuitive . . . all wiggly. It hasn’t any back and front and sides. . . . I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, “and I’m glad I don’t, because then I’d give it a silly name, like deconstructivism.” The ceiling is nine feet high in one spot, twenty feet in another. Its lighting is set into the floor, leading him to observe, “If I didn’t hate the term, I’d use the word ‘spiritual’ in this room.” In his nineties, Johnson posed for the cover of Out, a monthly gay and lesbian magazine. Previously, only a few knew that for over three decades he had shared his life with David Whitney, who when a 21-year-old college student had asked to see the Glass House and Johnson liked the idea. Whitney (who is not related to the New York family that founded the Whitney Museum of Art) moved in the day after he was graduated in 1963 by the Rhode Island School of Design, where he had studied architecture. With Johnson’s help, Whitney got a job at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), later worked for Leo Castelli, then ran his own art gallery, and became an assistant to Jasper Johns. A performer in Claes Oldenburg’s 1965 Happening, Whitney has said, it was my first nude scene. Everybody wanted to be the star, so I just decided to upstage them all and take my clothes off.” The two did not go out socially for their first fifteen years together but, after television star Barbara Walters twitted Johnson in the 1970s, the two began attending functions together. Whitney has become a major figure in the installing of exhibitions as well as in collecting art. Asked in 1996 about their relationship, Johnson told reporters that, although he had some trepidation, “Why not? People know I’m gay, so what am I so scared of?” Johnson was architect of the Cathedral of Hope, a gay and lesbian congregation in Dallas, Texas, that is part of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. “I love cathedrals, even though I’m not religious,” he said. “Besides, I don’t have too much work. Once you’re 90, people don’t tie you up for long-term projects.” Two months before his 90th birthday, Johnson, described as the cheerleader who had inspired so many young architects, was given a Gold Medal Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His reaction to receiving the award, previously received by such as Cass Gilbert, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Miës van der Rohe, was, “They made the rest of us look like a flock of pygmies.” {The New York Times, 11 April 1996}

Johnson, R. S. (19th Century) Johnson, a news agent, worked with John Bates as a secularist in Northampton in the 1860s. They formed an “Earnest and Thorough Radical Association,” but found so little support that they “had no more than the twelve apostles.” {RSR}

Johnson, Randall (20th Century) Johnson is treasurer of Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin. E-mail: <rjohnson@igc.apc.org>.

Johnson, Reid (20th Century) Johnson is Dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute (CFII). The institute offers a Certificate of Proficiency to students who have completed courses on Humanistic Studies, Critical Inquiry, or Science and the Paranormal. In 1999 courses were taught at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York; the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon; and the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Johnson, Richard Mentor (1781-1850) Johnson was an American statesman. An Army colonel, he fought with distinction against the British and the Indians. He was a member of Congress from 1817 to 1819 and from 1829 to 1837, a Senator from 1819—1829, and Vice President from 1837 to 1840. Johnson issued a report against the suspension of Sunday mails, and he favored the rights of conscience. Although he never stated his position as regards religion, McCabe noted, “pious folk noted that he was always opposed to them in practical matters, as when they wanted to suppress the Sunday postal service or interfere with religious liberty.” {BDF; FUS; JM; RAT; RE}

Johnson, Robert L. (20th Century) Johnson edits Think!, a bimonthly published by the World Union of Deists (Box 47026, St. Petersburg, Florida 33743). The journal examines existence from the perspective of Thomas Paine and other deists.

Johnson, Samuel (1769-1784) • Dr. Johnson, told by James Boswell that he was from Scotland, replied, “Sir, that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.” At their first meeting, Boswell had noted, “He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company. He has great humour and is a worthy man. But his dogmatical roughness of manners is disagreeable.” • When Hannah More told Johnson of “the pleasure and the instruction she had received from his writings,” Johnson retorted, “Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having.” • “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” Johnson said in July 1763. “It is not done well, but you are surprized to find it done at all.” In his poem “London” is a line, “And here a female Atheist talks you dead.” • At the time of his paralytic stroke in 1783, he told novelist Fanny Burney, that he had “composed in his own mind a Latin prayer to the Almighty, that whatever the sufferings for which he must prepare himself, it would please Him, through the grace and mediation of our blessed Saviour, to spare his intellects, and let them all fall upon his body.” • Shortly before his death Johnson told his friend William Adams about his fear of being considered one who was damned. Asked what he meant, he replied, according to Boswell, passionately and loudly, “Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.” When Adams responded that he did not believe in Hell, Johnson brought the conversation to an abrupt end, saying, “I’ll have no more on’t.” W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson (1998) speculated as to why: “The truth is that for Johnson there was a far worse alternative to damnation. It could be expressed by a remark John Wesley once made in a letter to his brother Charles (1766): ‘If I have any fear, it is not of falling into hell, but of falling into nothing.’ ” {Derek Jarrett, The New York Review of Books, 18 March 1999} Dr. Johnson, as everyone called him and as he still is known, was the son of a bookseller who became a consummate lexicographer, the author in 1747 of the Dictionary of the English Language, upon which he had worked for eight years. He started a moralistic periodical, The Rambler (1750), wrote a prose tale of Abyssinia, Rasselas (1759), became a social figure in the Literary Club, and was given a crown pension that enabled him to figure as an arbiter of letters. In 1773 he accompanied his biographer JamesBoswell on a tour of Scotland. Although his literary reputation did not exceed that of his conversationalism, Dr. Johnson was a major figure of his age.

Johnson, Samuel (1822—1882) Influenced by both the heritage of transcendentalism and the ferment of Free Religion in the Unitarian denomination, Johnson preached and lived a radical brand of individualism. A committed antislavery person—the English scholar Samuel Johnson (1709—1784) had a black servant, Francis Barber, for some thirty years, a person who married a white woman and inherited a large part of his fortune—he was requested by the Dorchester, Massachusetts, church “not to introduce any political subject into his next sermon,” to which he responded, “I am accustomed to preach upon such subjects as I deem it my duty, and in the performance of that I will not be interfered with.” In Lynn, Massachusetts, he persuaded the church to disassociate itself from the Unitarian denomination and become completely independent. In fact, he refused to join the Free Religious Association. Johnson looked beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition to the religions of the world for confirmation, and he was a pioneer in the study of Oriental religions, writing Oriental Religions and Their Relation to Universal Religion (1872—1885). Unitarians remember him particularly because with his friend Samuel Longfellow he produced the widely used Hymns of the Spirit (1864). {BDF; RAT; U&U}

Johnson, Sonia H. (1936— ) Johnson, a business consultant in California, is a freethinker who has written for Truth Seeker. She was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1979 for having supported the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Feminist Caucus of the American Humanist Association named Johnson in 1982 the first “Humanist Heroine,” and she responded that

We know men’s rights are worth laying down one’s life for. Patrick Henry is considered an American hero because he said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ No one doubts that, and the revolution was the result. Women must realize that women’s rights are worth the same sacrifice. Human rights are never bestowed. They are wrested.

Johnson has written From Housewife to Heretic (1981) and The Ship That Sailed Into the Living Room: Sex and Intimacy Reconsidered (1991). (See entry for Steve Benson.) {WWS}

Johnson Jr., Thomas B. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Johnson was a consulting psychologist. {HM2}

Johnson, William Harral (1834—1888) Johnson was a secularist lecturer in London. He collaborated with W. S. Ross and C. R. Mackay in libeling Bradlaugh. {FUK; VI}

Johnson-Fay, Ellen (20th Century) Johnson-Fay edited Unitarian Universalism in the Home (1982).

Johnston, Harry Hamilton [Sir] (1858—1927) Johnston was an ethnologist and an administrator. He studied painting and exhibited at the Academy, then studied anatomy and zoology. Finally, he entered the British administration in Africa and rose to be a Special Commissioner. Johnston wrote works on the African peoples. In a symposium, A Generation of Religious Progress (1916), Johnston revealed his agnosticism and closed the article, “Let us serve man before we waste our time in genuflections and sacrifices to any force outside this planet.” Johnston was an agnostic. {JM; RAT; RE}

Johnston, J. C. (20th Century) Johnston is active in the Scottish Humanist movement and writes for Scottish Humanist.

Johnston, R. P. (20th Century) Johnston, a freethinker, wrote Letters to a Missionary (1918). {GS}

Joja, Athanase (20th Century) Joja, a Romanian, developed a philosophic outlook that he called socialistic humanism.

Jokinen, Ruth (1920—1996) Jokinen for forty years ran an innovative private school and worked for civil rights and state-church separation. Her idols were church-state lawyer Leo Pfeffer, Thomas Paine, and Robert Green Ingersoll. When the Council for Secular Humanism purchased the Dresden, NY, Ingersoll birthplace in the mid-1980s, “Dixie” shocked Ingersoll fans by selling her home on Long Island and moving to Penn Yan, three miles from the Ingersoll birthplace. She became president of the Dresden, New York, chapter of the Robert G. Ingersoll Memorial Committee. In 1994 in Rochester, New York, she moderated a panel, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton Meets Susan B. Anthony,” at that group’s commemoration of Ingersoll’s work on behalf of women’s equality. “Her love of Ingersoll was legendary,” Tim Madigan noted upon her death.

Angelina Jolie, Actor ent Internet Movie Database

In the September 6, 2000 edition of The Onion A.V. Club titled "Is There A God?", celebrities were asked the question. Jolie was among those asked.

Actress and tabloid fixture Angelina Jolie will soon play computer-game character Lara Croft.

The Onion: Is there a God?

Angelina Jolie: Hmm... For some people. I hope so, for them. For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn't need to be a God for me. There's something in people that's spiritual, that's godlike. I don't feel like doing things just because people say things, but I also don't really know if it's better to just not believe in anything, either.

See the feature at http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3631/avfeature_3631.html.

Jolie, Angeina (4 June 1975 - ) Jolie is an actor who has been seen in Pushing Tin, The Bone Collector, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. During a Web edition of The Onion A.V. Club entitled “Is There A God?”, celebrities were asked to respond. Jolie responded:

Hmm . . . for some people, I hope so, for them. For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn’t need to be a God for me. There’s something in people that’s spiritual, that’s godlike. I don’t feel like doing things just because people say things, but I also don’t really know of it’s better to just not believe in anything, either.

(On the Web: < http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3631/avfeature_3631.html>) {CA}

Joly, Robert (20th Century) A professor of philosophy at the Université de Mons (Belgium), Joly is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. He is author of Christianisme et philosophie (1973).

JONAH “The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous,” wrote Thomas Paine, “but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.” And which is more probable, added Paine, “that a man should have swallowed a whale or told a lie?”

Jonas, Carl (1913—1976) The author of Jefferson Selleck (1953), Jonas wrote the present author as follows about humanism:

What you ask appalls me. A fiction writer hates to say these things directly and prefers to say what he is in the corkscrew fashion of his profession, leaving the task of labeling to the academician. It had never occurred to me to ask myself whether I were a humanist at all. Of course I might be, and then again I might not be. I am a fallen Middlewestern Baptist which means that I don’t go to church but have at least so my wife says a stern New England conscience; that I don’t believe in God but am terribly in awe of something; that my theoretical morality is as loose as a goose in the sluice but my actual morality is as confining as a pair of high tight shoes; that the good life consists of doing very seriously more or less what one wants to plus paying up the bills more or less promptly; that people are fundamentally good; that science is a great thing but that perhaps the price we pay for our electric refrigerators, Hotpoint ranges, antihistamine pills, the cathartics is a little high; that ends do not justify means; that love is one of the best things there is but that a lot of people seem to have to get along pretty much without it; that the game’s not over until the last ball’s played; that we would all probably be better off if we stopped smoking cigarettes but that probably we won’t; and that Scotch is considerably inferior to Bourbon. I also believe in the institution of marriage, in the United States Constitution, and in children, although I feel that, interesting as they are, they are considerably less interesting than adults. Oh yes, finally I believe that the Fifth Amendment should be changed, and that probably I am a Romantic… and that “Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire /To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits, and then / Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!” {WAS, 29 July 1954}

Jones, Allan (20th Century) Jones is a British activist in the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter 1998}

Jones, Chris (20th Century) Jones is editor in Australia of Victorian Humanist.

Jones, Chris (1964— ) Jones heads the Miami chapter of Atheists of Florida. “Religion is a disease,” he has said. “Plain and simple. Let’s treat it like we treat any disease—locate it, learn its weaknesses, and vigorously aim to eradicate it.” Christopher is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Jones, David E. H. (20th Century) Dr. Jones, of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and better known by his pen name Daedalus, has written witty columns in the British scientific journal Nature since 1964. In one of his serious investigations, Jones concluded that arsenic in the wallpaper of the St. Helena house where Napoleon ended his days might have hastened the exiled French emperor’s death. In one of his tongue-in-cheek columns, however, he has suggested that if the soul exists it should be possible to weight it. This could be accomplished, he proposes, by attaching piezoelectric transducers, inertial-navigation accelerometers, and other instruments to a dying person. This should make it possible to measure the direction, velocity, and spin of the soul as it leaves the body, causing the body to recoil slightly. The change in body weight would reveal the soul’s mass. “Spin,” explains journalist Malcolm W. Browne, “is a quantum property of subnuclear particles; the lepton and quark particles that make up matter have spins designated as one-half, while force-carrier particles like those of light have spins of zero, one, two, or other integer numbers.” Such an irreverent suggestion that “traditional theology is silent on the spin of the soul, though it may predict that the soul of a sinner would depart downward, and might weigh less than that of a righteous believer” predictably provoked a storm of criticism from theologians. Jones is author of The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (1982). (See entry for soul.)

Jones, Ernest (1879—1958) Dr. Jones, a noted psychoanalyst, was editor of International Journal of Psychoanalysis and author of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (3 volumes, 1953—1957). Invited to express his views on humanism, Jones wrote the present author:

Are the following remarks of any use? (1) The exceedingly diverse senses in which the word “Humanism” is used prove conclusively that it is futile to seek for a unitary definition. The word can have no precise meaning if Christian existentialists and communistic humanists among others use it to express their particular ideals; (2) I fit myself easily into category 7, naturalistic humanism; (3) The writer who most influenced me in this direction was Thomas Henry Huxley. A native of Wales, Jones was the only non-Continental and gentile member for many years of Freud’s inner circle of followers. Also, Jones did not speak German. Some of his colleagues considered him an outsider and were concerned about his reputation for sexual misconduct with his patients. They also were upset by his having called Otto Rank a “swindling Jew,” resulting in Jones’s being criticized as illustrating “the arrogance and clumsiness of the British.” Although Freud came to oppose and dislike Jones, Jones remained loyal to Freud. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Dr. Jones was instrumental in having Freud and his family taken to London, where Freud died the next year. His three-volume The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud upon its publication in 1953 was acclaimed as the authoritative work on the subject. Dr. Jones was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association when Bertrand Russell was its president. {CE; TRI; WAS, 12 May 1956}

Jones, Ernest Charles (1819—1869) Jones was a barrister and political orator. His father was in the service of the King of Hanover, who became his godfather. A Chartist, he edited People’s Paper, Notes to the People, and other Chartist periodicals. In 1848 he was tried for making a seditious speech and, during his two years in prison, wrote Beldagon Church and other poems. {BDF; RAT}

Jones, Jenkin Lloyd (1843—1918) Jones led the Unity men, a radically modernist element in Midwest Unitarianism of the later 19th century. Stressing an absolutely creedless “ethical basis” as the common element in the churches he wanted to bring together, he was criticized negatively for ridding them of Christology as well as theology. As secretary of the Western Unitarian Conference, and founder of Unity, he encountered friction from the Boston Unitarians because of his independent course. In 1882 he reorganized the 4th Unitarian Society in Chicago as All Souls Church, and a decade later he played a central role in the World’s Parliament of Religions. From 1905 to 1918 Jones was a director of the Abraham Lincoln Centre in Chicago and in opposition to World War I was a pacifist. Garry Wills of Northwestern University has described Jenkins as follows: “The Welsh relative who had greater influence on [Frank Lloyd Wright] than anyone but his mother was the liberal Unitarian preacher, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Wright’s ‘Uncle Jenk,’ who became a surrogate father to him after his own father’s defection. Jones was one of [Jane] Addams’s principal allies, a regular presence at Hull House.” (See entry for Frank Lloyd Wright.) {U&U}

Jones, John Gale (1771—1838) Jones was a political orator. At the time of the French Revolution he became a leading member of the London Corresponding Society. Arrested at Birmingham for sedition, he obtained a verdict of acquittal. He was subsequently committed to Newgate in 1810 for having impugned the proceedings of the House of Commons, remaining there until liberated by the prorogation of Parliament. In 1811 he was again convicted for “a seditious and blasphemous libel.” During the trials of Carlile and his shop men, Jones was a resolute advocate of the rights of free publication. {BDF}

Jones, John Percy (1872—1955) When Jones, the Tasmanian-born son of Irish Catholics, met Henry George in 1890, he rejected Catholicism and developed an interest in social questions. A founding member of the Socialist Party, Fabian Society, and Labor Party in Victoria, he stood as Labor candidate in 1910 and won the Victorian Legislative Council seat for East Melbourne. In 1925 he became director of the Rationalist Association of Australia. When he supported the conservative United Australia Party in 1934, he was expelled from the Labor Party. Jones’s allegiance to the Rationalist Society of Australia continued until his death. {SWW}

Jones, John S. (20th Century) Jones is on the editorial committee of New Zealand’s Rationalist and Humanist. Although Jon Murray visited in 1994 to inquire about moving to New Zealand with his mother, Jones in 1997 claimed that they never applied for residency and he did not know where the O’Hairs, who had mysteriously disappeared, were. {Time, 10 February 1997}

Jones, LeRoi (20th Century): See entry for Imamu Amiri Baraka.

Jones, Larry (20th Century) Jones is the Executive Director in Scotia, New York, of the Capital District Humanist Society. In 1996 he participated in the international conference of ethical humanists in Mexico City.

Jones, Llewellyn (1884—1961) A critic and Harvard professor, Jones wrote the present author regarding humanism:

As the first American “critic” to write about Johan Bojer, and the writer of the introduction to his works by Carl Gad, published when his American vogue was at its height, I have no hesitation in saying that at that time he was certainly a naturalistic humanist. I think it was at the end of The Great Hunger (1916) that the chief character says, when asked why he performed a chivalrous act, “. . . I sowed the corn in my enemy’s field that God might exist.” But this God is a humanly created God, and the same character expressly states that he does not believe in any resurrection, nor in Christ, but simply in human responsibility.

In 1954, Jones was program director of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, a group affiliated with the American Humanist Association. From 1954 to 1962, he was literary editor of The Humanist. Jones signed Humanist Manifesto I. {FUS; HM1; HNS; WAS, 20 Aug 1956}

Jones, Lloyd (1811—1886) Jones, the son of Catholic parents in County Cork, Ireland, came to Manchester in 1827 and joined the followers of Robert Owen. As “a social missionary,” he had numerous debates with ministers, notably one in 1839 on “The Influence of Christianity” with J. Barker, then a Methodist. Jones contributed to a number of cooperative and trades-union publications. Upon his death, it was found he had written a Life of Robert Owen. {BDF; FUK; TRI}

Jones, Margaretha (20th Century) An American ethical humanist, Jones spoke on the subject of “UNICEF and the Rights of Children” at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. She is the IHEU’s representative to UNICEF. Her e-mail: <aeugrowth@aol.com>.

Jones, Peter (20th Century) Jones, in Scotland, is a corresponding secretary of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.

Jones, Philip F. (1939— ) Jones was president of the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) from 1989 to 1993, and he was the first president of the Coalition for Secular Humanist and Freethought (CSHAFT), serving from 1992 to 1994. Since 1962, he has been a member of the British Rationalist Press Association, and he has been a life member of the British Humanist Association since 1970. In 1994 at the Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), of which he is a former president, Jones spoke on “What Is the Good Life? A Humanist Perspective.” Jones is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Jones, Robert Edwards (Born 1927) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Jones was executive director of the Joint Washington Office for Social Concern. An ordained Unitarian minister, Jones in 1960 was campaign press secretary to Governor Volpe of Massachusetts. He has represented the Ethical Union, the American Humanist Association, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. In 1954, he was the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and in 1952 he was his party’s delegate to the Democratic Convention. {HM2}

Jones, S. H. (20th Century) Jones in 1936 published Humanism, explaining his Unitarian views concerning religious humanism.

Jones, Stanley (20th Century) Jones, a freethinker, wrote Genesis and Science (c. 1910). {GS}

Jones, Tova (20th Century) Jones is secretary of the Birmingham Humanist Group in England.

Jones, W. H. (19th Century) With F. G. Jannaway, Jones wrote the Immortal Soul Debate (1895). {GS}

Jones, William (1819—1893) Jones was an Australian freethinker, sculptor, and orator. He was president of the Central Cumberland Secular Society in 1886, one of the earliest of Sydney’s groups. He lectured on theology and the Bible, becoming the only person in Australia to be convicted of blasphemy. In 1871 he was sentenced to two years in jail and a fine of £100 for lecturing against the Bible, but the fine was paid by public subscription and he was released on a two-year good-behavior bond. {RSR; SWW}

Jones, (William) Bill T(ass) (1952— ) Jones, the African American who is director of the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, met Zane at the State University of New York when nineteen and the two made a success of their venture. However, both were diagnosed as being HIV-positive in 1985, and Zane died from AIDS in 1988. Jones has continued to perform and to include social messages in his ballets. Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times has described Jones as being “anything but your conventional social protest choreographer, and [is] a hot ticket on the international dance scene.” Over five thousand attended a world première of his “Still/Here” in Lyons, France, September 1994. “I have to be very clear about what I do with the time I have left—build my art,” he has stated, adding that at this important time in human history our attitudes about death and sex are being brought to a head. “So I’d like to be recognized as being a major voice in the things Arnie and I stood for. . . . In 20 or 30 years, we’ll be out from the Middle Ages, the Inquisition. This is a benign universe that exists on a level so far beyond the screams and cries of the Holocaust, my mother’s tears, beyond lesions and sores and gasping for air in the last moments of life. I think if we look back, it’ll be understood that we know what it feels for me to right now be saying, I am HIV positive, and I am all right. I am a homosexual man, and I have been promiscuous, and that too is all right.” As for the future, and knowing in 1994 that his physical condition was deteriorating, Jones has accepted his demise with a secular humanist’s outlook (although he has not specifically addressed theism or non-theism):

I will never grow old. My hands will never be discolored with the spots of age. I will never have varicose veins. My balls will never become pendulous, hanging down as old men’s balls do. My penis will never be shriveled. My legs will never be spindly. My belly, never big and heavy. My shoulders never stooped, rounded, like my mother’s shoulders are. . . . My face will never wrinkle. . . . My teeth will never yellow.

And how, he is asked by Henry Louis Gates Jr., does he envision his last night on earth? Jones hopes his affairs will be in order, that the dance foundation will be out of debt, that Bjorn Amelon (who, after Zane’s death and Jones’s five years with Arthur Aviles, became his present lover) will be healthy, that he will have a chance to send notes to all his friends, “and then I’d listen to music. On that day, it would be Nina Simone. It would be a long album. I’d hear the sound of the leaves outside. And I’d take pills and go to sleep. . . . I’d be by myself. I’d have to be by myself.” (See Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Body Politic,” The New Yorker, 28 November 1994; and Larry Kaplan, “Bill T. Jones On Top,” Poz, July 1994.)

Jones, William Ronald (20th Century) Jones, a lecturer on religious humanism, was named 1992 Humanist Pioneer by the American Humanist Association. An African American, once a fundamentalist, he is founder and director of the black studies program at Florida State University. Dr. Jones, who received his Master of Divinity degree at Harvard, edited Black Theology, a series of essays. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton and at Union Theological Seminary as well as at Brown and Howard. In South Africa, he has completed extensive fieldwork in conflict resolution. He is a contributing editor of Religious Humanism, a quarterly of the Fellowship for Religious Humanists.

Jones, Willie [Governor] (18th Century) Jones, a post-Revolutionary politician, was a freethinker who stipulated in his will that no one was to insult his body by mumbling religious words over it. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)

Jonson, Ben (1572—1637) Jonson, the English dramatist and poet who wrote Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610) killed Gabriel Spencer, a well-known actor, in a duel. He escaped execution by claiming “right of the clergy,” a term signifying that he could read and write. Jonson, a Christian, was buried in Westminster where his epitaph reads O rare Ben Jonson, evidently not a wry observation that to save space he had been buried standing up. {PA; TYD}

Jordan, David Starr (1851—1931) A zoologist and President of the World Peace Congress in 1915, Jordan was a Unitarian Universalist, more specifically a non-Christian theist. “The creeds have no permanence in human history,” he wrote in his Stability of Truth. {JM; RAT; RE; UU}

Jordan, Joseph Fletcher (1863—1929) Although a presiding elder in the Methodist Church, Jordan was troubled by the doctrine of “hell and endless punishment.” As a result and after hearing a sermon by Quillen H. Shinn, he converted to Universalism. One of the important early African American Universalist leaders, he was principal of the Suffolk Normal Training School in Virginia which had been started by Joseph H. Jordan (no relation). The school was supported until 1939 by the Universalist General Convention and the General Sunday School Convention. Although the school flourished, educating as many as three hundred students each year, membership at the church dwindled, and it closed in the 1930s. He wrote The Distance Traveled (1984?). {U; U&U}

Jordan, Joseph H. (1842—1901) The first black to be ordained in the Universalist ministry, Jordan delivered in 1893 an address to the Universalist General Convention in Washington, DC, to ask support “for a mission to the Negroes in the South.” {U&U}

Neil Jordan, Film Director ent Internet Movie Database

Jordan, director of Interview with an Vampire talked with Salon writer Michael Sragow in December 1999. We join the interview in progress...

MS: Because of reincarnation --

NJ: It would have suited me down to the ground.

You know, we do have this need for mysticism. That is in my movies. And I always like to do stories about gods and monsters and imaginary beings of all kinds.

MS: And how does this fit into "The End of the Affair"?

NJ: Because God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought. And I guess that's what compelled me to do a film of this Graham Greene book -- the challenge of portraying a man who's in a triangular relationship that's really a quadrangle, and one quarter will never reveal itself.

The full interview may be found at http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/1999/12/09/jordan/

Jordan, Neil (25 Feb 1950 - ) Jordan, a screen and scriptwriter, is a director of movies. Born in Sligo, Ireland, while still in his twenties he won The Guardian Fiction Prize for a book of short stories, Night in Tunisia (1976), then wrote several novels: The Past (1979), The Dream of a Beast (1983), and Sunrise With Sea Monster (1994). His first feature film, Angel (1982), won The London Evening Standard’s Most Promising Newcomer Award. The London Critics Circle and The Academy of Science Fiction and Horror Films honored him with Best Film and Best Director Awards for his Company of Wolves (1984). Mona Lisa (1986) starred Michael Caine, Cathy Tyson, and Bob Hoskins, who won the Best Actor Award at The Cannes film Festival. This was followed by two comedies, High Spirits (1983) and We’re No Angels (1989, starring Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn). His other films: The Crying Game (1992) was voted Best Foreign Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and Best Screenplay by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Writers Guild of America, among other awards received worldwide. Interview With the Vampire (1994, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, and Christian Slater) and Michael Collins (1996, starring Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, and Julia Roberts); and The Butcher Boy (1997); In Dreams (1999, starring Annette Bening, Robert Downey Jr., Aidan Quinn, and Stephen Rea); The End of the Affair (1999, an adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, and Stephen Rea); and Not I (2000, a fourteen minute film based on Samuel Beckett’s play and starring Julianne Moore). All his works have received numbers of awards and honors. Jordan, who lives in Dublin, was asked by Salon writer Michael Sragow (Dec 1999) some questions and responds that God is simply an imaginary being:

Jordan: You know, we do have this need for mysticism. That is in my movies. And I always like to do stories about gods and monsters and imaginary

beings of all kinds. 

MS: And how does this fit into The End of the Affair? Jordan: Because God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought. And I guess that’s what compelled me to do a film of this Graham Greene book—the challenge of portraying a man who's in a triangular relationship that's really a quadrangle, and one quarter will never reveal itself. (On the Web: http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/1999/12/09/jordan/) {CA}

Jordan, Stuart (20th Century) Jordan is a past president and current board member of the Washington Area Secular Humanists. He is a senior staff scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center. {“E. O. Wilson’s Consilience,” Free Inquiry, Fall 1998).

Jordan, Terry G. (20th Century) Jordan wrote “A Religious Geography of the Hill Country Germans of Texas,” Ethnicity on the Great Plains (1980). He is a professor of geography at the University of Texas. {Freethought History #15, 1995}

Joseph II [Emperor] (1741—1790) Joseph II was Emperor of Germany, the son of Francis I and Maria Theresa. In 1764 he was elected king of the Romans, and in the following year succeeded to the throne of Germany. He wrought many reforms, suppressed the Jesuits in 1773, traveled in France as Count Falkenstein, saw d’Alembert, but did not visit Voltaire. He abolished serfdom, allowed liberty of conscience, suppressed several convents, regulated others, abridged the power of the pope and the clergy, and mitigated the condition of the Jews. Carlyle said, “A mighty reformer he had been, the greatest of his day. Austria gazed on him, its admiration not unmixed with terror. He rushed incessantly about, hardy as a Charles Twelfth; slept on his bearskin on the floor of any inn or hut;—flew at the throat of every absurdity, however broad and based or dangerously armed. ‘Disappear I say.’ A most prompt, severe, and yet beneficent and charitable kind of man. Immensely ambitious, that must be said withal. A great admirer of Friedrich [unidentified person, not Nietzsche]; bent to imitate him with profit. ‘Very clever indeed,’ says Friedrich, ‘but has the fault’ (a terribly grave one!) of generally taking the second step without having taken the first.” {BDF}

Joseph, M. C. (20th Century) In Iranjalakuda, India, Joseph became editor of Yukthivadi in 1929. {FUK}

Joseph, Newton (20th Century) Joseph, a secular humanist, is a counselor on the staff of the nonprofit San Fernando Valley Counseling Center in Northridge, California. He has written for Freethought Perspective (April 1999 and June 1999) and Secular Nation (April-June 1999).

Josephson, Matthew (1899—1977) Josephson, a freethinker, wrote Edison, A Biography (1959) and The Robber Barrons (republished, 1995). {FS}

Josephus, Flavius (37—95?) Josephus, a soldier who took part in the war between the Romans and the Jews, wrote several works of history. These include The Jewish War, Antiguities of the Jews, and Against Aprion, the latter a defense of the Jews. As Edmund Wilson and others have pointed out, Josephus was an apologist for the Romans and a cultural convert to Greco-Roman views.

Josephy, Walter (20th Century) Josephy, an Ottawa humanist, is on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada.

Joshi, Kumudben (20th Century) Joshi was at the inauguration in 1990 of the Golden Jubilee of the Atheist Centre.

Joshi, Tarkateerth Lakshman Sastri (Deceased) Joshi was known for his encyclopedic sweep of knowledge in Western and Eastern philosophy. He was editor of the Marathi language encyclopedia, Vishwa Kosh.

Joshua (Born 1895) Joshua was an Indian humanist poet, one for whom a foundation has been named and which will present literary awards to writers in his humanist tradition. The Telegu foundation encourages literature which “inspires humans to fix their sights on the heights of humanism and grow in moral stature and which helps them to master inner strength to march ahead in hope and which translates their dreams into reality. We need poets who rise above caste, religion, and politics and sing of truths about human welfare and Universal truth, and the Universal Human family. The poet’s words should kindle hope in the minds of people, torn asunder by fear and violence.” {International Humanist News, December 1993}

Jospin, Lionel [Prime Minister] (1937— ) Jospin, France’s Education Minister from 1991 to 1992, was born into a Protestant family but has described himself as an atheist. His wife is Sylviane Agacinski, a professor of philosophy in Paris. Jospin, a graduate of the Institute of Political Studies and National School of Administration in Paris, joined the Socialist Party when François Mitterrand revived it in 1971. The chairman of the Socialist Party (1981—1987), Jospin was his party’s candidate for the French Presidency in 1995. He lost to Jacques Chirac but won a majority (52%) of the votes cast by 18- to 24-year-olds. He became Prime Minister in 1997. {CA; E; The Economist, 18 April 1998}

Jouffroy, Theodore Simon (1796—1842) Jouffroy, a French philosopher, followed Cousin, his master, in philosophy. After the 1830 Revolution, Jouffroy was appointed professor at the École Normale. He was a member of the Eclectic School and a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Science and the Educational Council. He wrote Mélanges Philosophiques. {RAT}

JOURNAL FOR THE CRITICAL STUDY OF RELIGION, ETHICS, AND SOCIETY A bi-annual, the Journal for the Critical Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society is published by Prometheus Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228.

JOURNAL OF HUMANISM AND ETHICAL RELIGION The Journal of Humanism and Ethical Religion is at 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023.

JOURNAL OF RATIONAL RECOVERY As an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous publications, Jack Trimpey edits the Journal of Rational Recovery, Box 800, Lotus, California 95651.

JOURNALISM • The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread. —Oscar Wilde

Jouy, Victor Joseph Etienne de (1764—1846) Jouy was a French author who served as a soldier in India and afterwards in wars of the Republic. A disciple of Voltaire, to whom he erected a temple, Jouy was a prolific writer whose plays were much esteemed in his day. {BDF}

Jowett, Benjamin (1817—1892) Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Master of Balliol, and Vice-Chancellor of the University (1882—1886). He never rejected his clerical Orders, but he was important not only as one of the leading scholars of his time but also as a liberalizing influence in the University and the Church. He rejected not only the Christian creed but also the idea of a personal God. “The priests will always be too many for you,” he observed. Furthermore, he was skeptical about immortality. In the Life and Letters, Jowett says that “Voltaire has done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put together” and “whether we shall recognize others in another life we cannot tell.” To Sir R. Morier in a letter written a year before his death, Jowett wrote, “I fear that we are both rather tending to some degree of Agnosticism.” {RAT; RE; TYD}

Joyce, James (Augustine) (Aloysius) (1882—1941) 

According to David Tribe, Joyce was an outright freethinker. The famed Dublin-born novelist was educated at the Jesuit schools Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College. In 1901 he wrote a letter of admiration in Dano-Norwegian to Ibsen, the philosophic naturalist and freethinker, and other early influences were Dante, George Moore, and Yeats. Disliking the narrowness and bigotry of Ireland (“that scullery maid of Christendom”) and Irish Catholicism, Joyce went to Paris for a year in 1902, living in poverty and writing verse. Upon his mother’s death, he returned to Dublin, stayed briefly, then left Ireland with Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he spent the rest of his life and who bore him a son and a daughter. Dubliners (1941), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses (1914-1921) brought him much fame, although Ulysses was delayed by obscenity charges and did not appear in the United States until 1933. The novel, however, was received as a work of genius by writers as varied as T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, and Arnold Bennett. Less admiring were Claudel, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Often quoted is Joyce’s reference to the Holy Ghost, Jesus’s farewell to his Apostles on Mount Olivet:

I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. My mother’s a Jew, my father’s a bird. . . .

What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly, And Olivet’s breezy. . . . Goodbye, now, goodbye.

The photographer Andres Serrano tells the story that Joyce, sitting for a painter who said he wanted to capture Joyce’s soul, was told, “Forget the soul. Just get the tie right.” After 1922, Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake (1939). He suffered greatly from eye trouble, and a severe attack of glaucoma in 1917 led to years of pain and several operations. In his later years, he was much troubled by his daughter’s mental illness. Joyce died in Zürich in 1941. Critics often call Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Joyce the major novelists of the twentieth century. Gossips accused him of being a misanthrope, a cocaine addict, a person who tested his failing eyesight by counting the number of lights on the Place de la Concorde when he took his evening walks. Joyce is buried at the Fluntern Cemetery in Zurich, Switzerland. The gravestone is a flat marble slab inscribed only with name and vital dates in block lettering. Seated nearby is a statue of Joyce. {CE; OEL; TYD}

Joyner, Russell (20th Century) Joyner has been on the editorial board of The Humanist.

Juarez, Benito Pablo [President] (1806—1872) A full-blooded Indian, Juarez became President of the Republic of Mexico from 1858 to 1862 and again from 1867 to 1872. He previously had been Governor of Oaxaca, then Minister of Justice. A national hero, he fought a French attempt to establish a Mexican empire (1864—1867) under Maximilian. An atheist admired by Joseph McCabe, Juarez curtailed the clergy’s privileges and checked their corruption. Upon being elected President, he said, “To finish the fratricidal war encouraged by the clergy, it is necessary to deprive them of the wherewithal for their resistance, to disarm them completely, and to attain this result is a real necessity to carry out the reform, separating the church from the state, suppressing convents, extinguishing all kinds of religious congregations, closing the novitiates, nationalizing the property of the clergy, allowing freedom of choice to the worshipper to support a cult and establishing freedom of thought.” The Reform Laws he instituted, which were the key to the separation of church and state, have been influential up to the 1990s. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}

JUCK-SHILLUCK Juck-Shilluck, one of many African gods, is considered Creator of the World. {LEE}

Judah, Aaron (20th Century) Judah, in The Freethinker (July 1996), suggests that Judaism originally was henotheistic but became monotheistic because of St. Paul’s writings. “St. Paul should be in The Guiness Book of Records,” he explains, “as the biggest cuckoo in the transcendental element for having laid his monotheistic egg in our henotheistic nest.”

Judah, Samuel Benjamin Helbert (19th Century) Judah, a freethinker, wrote The Mystical Craft (1844). {GS}

JUDAISM Judaism, according to Samuel S. Cohon of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a term coined by Greek-speaking Jews “to designate their religious way of life in contrast with that of their neighbors, known as Hellenism.” The religion of Israel, a reference to pre-exilic developments, and Judaism, a reference to post-exilic developments, is artificial. The terms describe successive stages of the same religious process. “Judaism represents,” he continues, “the religious experience of the Jewish people, that is their consciousness of the sacred as embodied in the Torah both Written and Oral, or Scripture and Tradition. The stages of its growth correspond to the stages of Jewish political, cultural, and social evolution. Branching out of Semitic paganism, the religion of the early tribes of Israel was shaped by Moses at Sinai and Kadesh into the exclusive worship of Yahweh with a corresponding body of ritual and social legislation to meet the needs of the desert surroundings. In the agricultural economy of Canaan the nomadic religion acquired an elaborate sacrificial cult, festivals, sanctuaries, an organized priesthood, codes of laws, etc. It was greatly enriched by the institution of kingship and by the unique body of prophets, who advanced the monolatrous idea of Yahweh to the pure conception of ethical monotheism. The prophetic criticism of the cult and the subordination of ritual to righteousness affected priestly practice and resulted in the Deuteronomic Reformation, which centralized religious worship in Jerusalem and in the Zakodite priesthood.” In common usage, Judaism is the religion developed among the ancient Hebrews, one which holds that a transcendent God has revealed Himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets, choosing them as “the Chosen People.” One whose religion is Judaism is termed a Jew. Although some call themselves “atheistic Jews” or “non-Jewish Jews,” the combination of terms is lexicographically illogical, as would be the analogous combinations of “theistic agnostic” or “Hindu Christian.” However, writer Nat Henthoff and biologist Sheldon F. Gottlieb make a case for calling themselves atheists as well as Jews. Ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel have been critical of a Steven Spielberg movie, “Jurassic Park,” about dinosaurs which are brought back to life and which go wild. In 1993, Rabbi Zvi Gafner of the Agudath Israel Party, said, “It is inconceivable that we should give our seal of approval to a product that is imbuing Orthodox children with heresy. The dinosaur is presented in encyclopedias as an animal that is millions of years old, despite the fact that the world was created only 5,753 years ago.” In his Selected Papers, Bertrand Russell lists three sources of Western mentality: (1) Greek culture; e.g., Plato; (2) Jewish religion and ethics; e.g., the Old Testament; and (3) modern industrialism; e.g., Galileo, which itself is an outcome of modern science. “From the Jews we derive fanatical belief, which its friends call ‘faith’; moral fervor, with the conception of sin; religious intolerance; and some part of our nationalism.” (See entry for Jew. Also, see entry for Reconstructionism, which is different from Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Judaism.) {CE; ER}

Judd, Ernest E. (1860?—1930?) Judd was an early Australian freethinker, bookseller, and leader of the Socialist Labor Party. An anti-war activist and campaigner for the release of the “IWW Twelve” at the end of 1921, Judd regularly advertised freethought and birth control literature in Liberator, the secularist newspaper. {SWW}

Judkins, Larry (20th Century) Judkins, a columnist in California for the Sacramento Valley Mirror, is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and has written for Freethought Today.

Judkins, Makeda (20th Century) Judkins is President of the National Association in Service to Mentally Stressed African American Families (NASMAF). She is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.

JUGGERNAUT In Hinduism, a juggernaut is a deity, a deliverer from sin. His image is carried on a large wagon in an annual procession in India. According to legend, the wagon crushed worshippers who threw themselves under it. In common usage, a juggernaut is a force, an idea, or a system of beliefs that can overcome opposition—especially if it does so ruthlessly. {DCL; RE}

Julianus, Flavius Claudius [Emperor] (331?—363) 

Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor from 361 to 363 and nephew of Constantine I, succeeded Constantius II, who had named him as his successor. In the massacre of his family by the sons of Constantine, he escaped. At an early age, he was entrusted to Christian monks but soon began contrasting the Greek view of life and its intellectual activities with the gloomy piety and the theological hairsplitting of his teachers. Sometime in the course of his studies, Julian abandoned Christianity for an eclectic paganism, writing “Refutation of the Christian Religion.” He once declared, “No wild beasts are as hostile to men as Christian sects in general are to one another.” The work, which was acutely critical of the absurd stories in the Old Testament and also of the life of Christ, was destroyed by the efforts of Theodosius II. Julian was unsuccessful in restoring paganism by issuing an edict of religious toleration. During a campaign against the Persians, he was killed in a skirmish. McCabe, however, denies any truth to the legend that when he fell in battle he cried, “Thou has conquered, Galilaean.” This, states McCabe, is sheer Christian fabrication. The death of Julianus, wrote Wheeler, “was followed by the triumph of Christianity and the long night of the dark ages.” {BDF; FO; JM}

Jung, Carl Gustav (1875—1961) Jung, the famed Swiss psychiatrist, wrote about the psychology of religion in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), and he wrote Answer to Job (1966). In 1954, he was asked to respond to the present author’s categorization of seven humanisms. A. Jaffe, his secretary, replying that Prof. Jung had just left for his vacation, wrote the present author as follows:

I should say that he most nearly belongs to the group 7 (naturalistic humanism). But in order to make your own judgment, read two of his works: Psychology and Religion and his work on Synchronicity (which will appear one of these days in the Pantheon Edition, Bollingen Series).”

However, Paul Edwards in Immortality states that Jung, along with Paul Tillich and Timothy Leary, admired the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a favorite book of those believing in reincarnation, which is opposed to naturalistic humanism. Jung also regarded unfavorably the rationalist tradition of scientific thought. Further, Jung was unafraid to speak of the soul and the spiritual. In a 1959 letter to Ruth Topping, a Chicago social worker, Jung wrote, “. . . spiritual background has gone astray. Our Christian doctrine has lost its grip to an appalling extent, chiefly because people don’t understand it any more. Thus one of the most important instinctual activities of our mind has lost its object. As these views deal with the world as a whole, they create also a wholeness of the individual, so much so, that for instance a primitive tribe loses its vitality, when it is deprived of its specific religious outlook. People are no more rooted in their world and lose their orientation. They just drift. That is very much our condition, too. The need for a meaning of their lives remains unanswered, because the rational, biological goals are unable to express the irrational wholeness of human life. Thus life loses its meaning. That is the problem of the ‘religious outlook’ in a nutshell. The problem itself cannot be settled by a few slogans. It demands concentrated attention, much mental work and, above all, patience, the rarest thing in our restless and crazy time.” Gordon Stein, also, has written in The American Rationalist (October 1994) that Jung was no freethinker. Quite the opposite, in fact, for Freud’s break with Jung was partly because of Jung’s occultism and views concerning organized religion. Also, Jung is said to have been anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi up to the time the Nazis were defeated, after which he modified his stand. Freud further disapproved of Jung’s having made a pass at Ms. Spielrein, one of his patients, after which she went to Freud for treatment. A clinical psychologist, Richard Noll, wrote The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (1994), in which he accused Jung of having falsified dates in relation to the theory of the collective unconscious. That theory holds that people share images, buried deep in their unconscious, which influence their thought and behavior. Jung cited the case known as the Solar Phallus Man, who had been a patient at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich and claimed to have seen a vision of the sun with a phallus. Jung contended that the image came from the ancient Hellenic mystery cult of Mithras, a pagan god associated with sun worship. However, argues Noll, the person was the patient of Honegger, Jung’s assistant. After Honegger committed suicide in 1911, Jung gradually took credit for the case. Noll holds that the Solar Phallus Man may have been a regurgitating of what popular books were reporting at the time, books about mythology, Mithras, paganism, and the occult. Jung, according to Noll, changed the dates of publication to show that the man could not have read such works. Noll further charges that Jung knowingly lied about the case as well as included anti-Semitic writings that formed the basis of Nazi ideology. Although Jung was admittedly never a Nazi, Noll claims there was a secret Jewish quota for the Analytical Psychology Club, an early Jungian association founded in 1916 in Zurich by Jung’s followers. Jung is buried in the family plot of the Village Cemetery, Küsnacht, Switzerland. On the gravestone is an epitaph:

First, the terrestrial man of the earth Second, the celestial man of heaven Called or not called. God is present

{CE; ER; TRI; WAS, 5 August 1954}
Junghuhn, Franz Wilhelm (1812—1864)

Junghuhn, son of a Prussian barber and surgeon, studied at Halle and Berlin, distinguishing himself by his love for botany and geology. In a duel with another student, he killed him and was sentenced to imprisonment at Ehrenbritster for twenty years. There he simulated madness, was removed to the asylum at Coblentz, and escaped to Algiers. In 1834 he joined the Dutch Army in the Malay Archipelago, traveling through the island of Java and making a botanical and geological survey. In 1854, he published his Licht en Schaduwbulden uit de binnenlanden van Java (Light and Shadow Pictures from the Interior of Java), which contains his ideas of God, religion, and science, together with sketches of nature and of the manners of the inhabitants. The pious were indignant, but freethinkers established De Dageraad (The Daybreak) as the organ of the Dutch Freethinkers Union. Junghuhn died in Java. {BDF}

JUPITER Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun, has four satellites which Galileo in 1610 discovered: Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Amalthea. Space probes starting in 1973 led in 1997 to photographs from the Galileo spacecraft of Europa, showing icy domes and ridges. Astronomers speculated that because of the ice Europa might actually be able to support some form of life. Arthur C. Clarke, whose 3001 was published before the photographic findings, had already anticipated that life existed on various planets. He also fictionalized that in 3001 a city of 41,000, Anubis City near Io’s South Pole, had people “engaged in terraforming and scientific research.”

JUSTICE Bertrand Russell, in Sceptical Essays (1928), wrote that in a modern democratic society justice must prevail and justice must be the governing principle. “Such things as food, houses, and clothes are necessaries of life, about the need of which there is not much controversy or much difference between one man and another. . . . But [justice] would not mean equality in a community where there was a hierarchy of classes, recognized and accepted by inferiors as well as superiors. Even in modern England, a large majority of wage earners would be shocked if it were suggested that the King should have no more pomp than they have. I should therefore define justice as the arrangement producing the least envy. This would mean equality in a community free from superstition, but not in one which firmly believed in social inequality.” In The Art of Philosophizing (1968), Russell wrote: “The only way in which a society can live for any length of time without violent strife is by establishing social justice. Justice between classes is difficult where there is a class that believes itself to have a right to more than a proportionate share of power or wealth. Justice between nations is only possible through the power of neutrals, because each nation believes in its own superior excellent. Justice between creeds is even more difficult, since each creed is convinced that it has a monopoly of the truth of the most important of all subjects.” (See Alan Ryan’s “Politics of Dignity,” The New York Review of Books, 11 July 1996, in which he discusses John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, F. A. Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice, and Avishai Margalit’s The Decent Society.) {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}

JUSTICE BY GRACE, THROUGH FAITH Justification by grace, in Christianity, is the belief that a person can achieve salvation only through faith and reliance on God’s grace, not through good deeds. Paul wrote, “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” By being friendly with God one is entitled to life with God in Heaven after death. During the Reformation, Luther’s slogans were “Grace Alone” and “Faith Alone,” which he urged against the common teaching of the Catholics, that people’s good works, as well as their faith, helped to save them. Since the time of Luther, Protestants and Catholics have had few differences on the subject. {DCL}

Justice, Jeffrey A. (20th Century) Justice is a commentator about Biblical inconsistencies. He has written for The Skeptical Review. J